


Up In The Air

by star_child



Series: City of Angels [1]
Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Alternate Universe - Stripper/Exotic Dancer, Alternate Universe - Wings, American Sign Language, Child Abuse, Child Neglect, M/M, Mute Kenma, Muteness, Sexual Abuse, Slow Build, Strippers & Strip Clubs, Tattoos, Team as Family, bc i don't know japanese sign language okay, but these are the important ones - Freeform, college student kuroo, like super slow, most ppl are mentioned, stripper kenma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-13
Updated: 2018-05-29
Packaged: 2019-03-17 17:22:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 8
Words: 56,313
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13663737
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/star_child/pseuds/star_child
Summary: The Sendai Genetics Lab is on its last legs of life.For nine years, he survives the lab. For another eight, he survives the streets. At the age of seventeen, his life takes its third turn, finally for the better.With the help of an eclectic array of souls, a mutant without a name discovers what it means to have a family.





	1. Out of My Head

**Author's Note:**

> hey so i spent two years writing this and it's hella fucking long and was my Baby but tbh i don't love it like i used to, tho i'm still proud and i learned a lot while writing!! i hope you enjoy my crazy ass pacing and aggressive attempts to create an Atmosphere

Sendai City Hospital  
Date: _October 16, 1998_  
Patient Name: _Kozume Kiko_  
Patient Age: _17 years_  
Notes: _Patient gave birth nineteen days early to a son. He is worryingly small, showing weak vitals. He is not expected to live._

 

_4:16 am_

Silence weighs heavy in the hallways, in the rooms, in the stairwells. The machinery seems muted and dull in the stifling darkness, every hiss and creak and shuffle is unbearably loud. This is the darkness only present in the earliest hours of the morning, the dead of night.

_4:17 am_

It feels as though the entire world has been sleeping for decades.

“Kozume-kun.”

The girl looks up from her lap, trying to wipe away the mascara stains on her cheeks. It only smudges, making the bags under her eyes look worse.

She stares at the man who has just entered the room. Between the lab coat, glasses, clipboard, and her own fatigue, she does not assume he is anything other than the doctor he is presented as. “Yeah?” Her voice shakes, desperation dripping from the cracks. “Where’s my son? Is he okay?”

“Kozume-kun, I am very sorry to have to tell you this…” The doctor – no, _scientist_ – watches as the girl’s face crumples, and almost feels bad for her. Almost.

His fingers tighten on the clipboard in his hands, and he presses on. _It’s for the greater cause,_ he tells himself. _This girl likely cannot take care of a child anyhow. She loses a child so thousands of people do not face unemployment._ “...But I am afraid that your son… did not make it.”

Kozume Kiko looks back down at her lap, nodding as more tears find their way to her eyes. “Okay,” she says softly. “Okay. They told me he probably wouldn’t, I just…” She sniffles, wipes more mascara on the sleeve of the hoodie she’s wearing over her hospital gown.

It’s a boy’s model, the scientist notices. He wonders where the child’s father is, then immediately scolds himself for thinking about these people’s personal lives.

“I’d hoped they were wrong, y’know?” Her voice is small, holds so much pain that it’s all the man can do to simply bow and quickly leave the room, closing the door on her crumpling form.

Just outside the room, a strong hand lands on his shoulder, stopping him in his tracks. He looks up, into the eyes of his boss. Cold and calculating, his very presence makes the scientist shake in his shoes.

“It’s done?” he demands.

“Yes sir,” he nods, bowing so low his forehead nearly touches his knees. “The child is ours.”

 

The Sendai Genetics Lab is on its last legs of life.

Once a pristine and respected establishment, they had been well known all over the world for their ever successful genetic experimentation. Great leaps and bounds had been made within these walls, pushing the very laws of nature until they’d been disregarded completely, and things once thought scientifically impossible became mere facts of life.

Anything their staff had needed was at their disposal: test subjects, top of the line equipment, research… For decades, the SGL was the king of science, the very pinnacle of what humanity could do.

In the years leading up to their collapse, they had been studying the possibilities of splicing animal DNA into humans, and vice versa, trying to create something, _anything_ , that could survive with characteristics of both. Evolving stem cell research made anything possible.

Much of their testing had moved to combining two separate animals – small rodents with the agility and climbing skills of a cat, birds with dog’s hearing, rats and mice that can solve increasingly difficult problems – given the complications that came with getting a human test subject. But research and testing on the front had yet to cease entirely.

The animal experiments were immensely successful. Animals everywhere were mass bred to produce those of higher intelligence: more elite police dogs, smarter and faster animals of prey to deal with species that had overpopulated an area, spy birds designed to repeat what they heard to their masters…

Then things began to go downhill.

Scandal after scandal was rapidly revealed to the public. Lying about results, hiding failed experiments from the public eye, cheating and ignoring sound science in order to get the desired outcome…

Outsiders had never been allowed too far into the building, simply kept up front where the building reflected its status in public appearance: bright and warm and clear, all shiny metal and sleek glass. Welcoming. Professional. Trustworthy. No one ever questioned it, assumed that the back was simply off limits to the public, and it was. For very good reason.

Behind locked doors, subjects were being beaten, neglected, viewed not as living animals but as mere objects to be bent to the scientists’ will. So many were born in captivity, lived a short, harsh life, and died in pain before being tossed aside without a second thought. It was completely inhumane, unethical, immoral, corrupt.

Funding was pulled rapidly. The government began questioning the ethics of their experimentation, wondering if maybe science _had_ gone too far. If none of this was ever meant to happen. Genetically modified animals began to prove unstable, lashing out violently, contracting diseases they should have been immune to. They had been created as quickly as possibly to show fast results, not designed for the long term.

It was a disaster.

In the end, the lab’s funding was slashed to a minuscule fraction of what it had been, enough to keep it up and running, but not without major downsizing. Thousands upon thousands of job losses, acres of land sold, entire branches around the world demolished as if they’d never been there. The government essentially turned its back, assuming the lab would die out without sufficient funding.

It practically did. It came incredibly close on multiple occasions, but always managed to fight and claw its way back. A grant here, a grant there, bank loans… it was enough.

Research moved away from combining animals. They had to think bigger.

And what have humans always sought after?

Flight.

 

Realistically they weren’t aiming for anything very high. Actual usable wings, human flight, was not something they saw feasible, even all past accomplishments considered. The bone density of a human is much too high, our lungs too small. We don’t possess the muscle strength required to lift our own weight for more than a few seconds.

For now all they were going for was a subject who could (somewhat) naturally grow a pair of wings, and be able to voluntarily move them. Stretch them out, fold them up, flap them, things like that.

For _years_ , they tested.

Any children they could get their hands on that were still developing – orphans, abandoned children, ones who appeared they wouldn’t make it – were taken in, and done extensive testing on. All were injected with what the scientists hoped would be the right strain of DNA, along with necessary stem and crispr cells. Nearly none survived.

Wings were often not the outcome, but rather horrifying children with avian mutations: skin disorders due to the conflicting need within their bodies to grow feathers, children unable to eat or speak due to something akin to a beak in place of a mouth.

But they kept at it. They whittled away until the precise strands of DNA that controlled wings had been isolated, and then, finally, they were getting somewhere.

Only a few children lived long enough to even show signs of growing wings – painful looking bumps poking out of the tops of their backs, over their shoulder blades – but they too eventually died for one reason or another. Overexertion and neglect were the most common, along with conflicting DNA still inside the body, causing problems with growth or development, most commonly in the back and shoulders.

Still, experimentation carried on.

 _Subject W58… Subject W59… Subject W60…_ The public was disgusted when they found out they were continuing to experiment on humans, on _children,_ but did not view the subjects any more human than the lab did. _Those poor creatures…_ Mothers would titter to one another, _They should be put out of their misery… Such a sad existence…_

The brown haired child – _Subject KW75 –_ they bring in from the capital is expected to be nothing but a dump. He’s far too underdeveloped to do anything with right away, being born almost a month too early to a less-than-responsible teenager. But even if he wasn’t, it’s not like there’s a lot they can do with a newborn, other than giving him the injections all new subjects receive and wait to see what happens.

One of the female scientists is assigned to take care of him and make sure he doesn’t die, and she does as little as possible to complete this task. She feeds him, washes him, empties a drawer in her bureau for him to sleep in. The other scientists start referring to her as ‘The Gardener,’ because all she does is feed and water him.

The crying and babbling are what prove to be an issue.

With ‘strict discipline’ and ‘a firm parental hand’ as she calls it, the child has hardly made a sound in two months by the time he’s three years old.

Those three years are more or less hell for the young boy. From the moment he can walk he's being tested on – how far can he run through a maze, how fast? How long can he go without food? Can he survive high doses of this drug, how about this one? Dozens upon dozens of needle pricks for blood tests he is never told the point of, injections of substances he doesn’t recognize. He is forbidden from asking, making noise is highly frowned upon. Speaking is completely prohibited.

When he is three and a half, they begin to _grow._

The pain is unimaginable, since the wings are slowly, physically, _ripping_ through his skin. He’s been on medication for months, training to build muscle, laid for hours in x-ray machines – he can barely _walk,_ can’t speak, can just barely even be classified as a toddler. But he is nothing more than a lab rat, a test, a _toy._ The faculty hardly see him as human anymore, just another test subject here to be observed.

Eventually, he requires surgery. His vocal cords are weak and underdeveloped, practically non-functioning, but he terrifies interns and scientists alike when they try to move him, and lets out guttural _shrieks_ of agony. No amount of shouting back or threats will make him stop, and finally one of the younger interns demands that he undergo surgery, to put an end to both the screaming and his suffering.

So they anesthetize him, and one of the doctors slices through the skin to give the wings room in an almost careless manner. They require stitches after, and those too are sloppy and half-assed, making a mess of the boy’s shoulder blades and back.

But they can’t be bothered. Because when the anesthesia wears off, he _wakes up._ He wakes up and he has promising nubs on his back.

He has _wings._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> today, on Star Throws Science At The Wall To See What Sticks


	2. Stuck in a Moment

Sendai Genetics Lab  
Date: _November 1, 2002_  
Subject Name: _N29 KW75_  
Subject Age: _4 years 16 days_  
Notes: _Test has been successful, seven months since wing growth has begun. Subject even seems to be able to move them. Surrounding area remains sensitive, but intact._  
Scheduled For Today: _Dr. Kindasa will be visiting at 11:30am_  
 

“This is him?”

“Yes, sir.”

The intern who is acting as the boy’s monitor this year – in charge of feeding him, keeping him alive, making sure he isn’t scheduled for more than one test at once – stands to the side, allowing the other man to lean forward to get a better look at the small boy, curled up in a corner of his futon. He’s wearing nothing but boxers, his hair chocolate and straight and falling in his eyes. Those eyes watch both of them carefully, filled with an intelligence not normally found in four-year-olds.

“What do you call him?”

“Scientifically speaking, his identification is N29 KW75, sir, but most of the scientists in the labs shorten it to 75. His file also says that his family name is Kozume, but that seems… largely ignored, for some reason, sir.”

“But what about  _ you?” _ Dr. Kindasa pushes. “What do  _ you  _ call him? You spend the most time with him, yes?”

“Well, I suppose. Ah – yes, sir.” The intern shakes his head, clearing it. “Many of the other interns and myself call him Tori-chan.”  _ Little bird. _

“Incredible,” he breathes. “Can he understand us?”

“Yes, we believe he can understand most Japanese, as well as some Latin. He doesn’t speak, however. It’s not allowed during testing and some of the punishments are rather ah, unnecessarily harsh.” The intern, like the rest of them, is young. Fresh out of college, he’ll work for a year before deciding whether or not to continue. Seeing a toddler hit clear across the face is expectedly rather jarring.

“That’s a shame, I’m sure we could learn much more from him.” The man crouches down and sticks his hand out as if beckoning to an animal. “Come here, Tori-chan,” he says, voice high and lilting, “Let me see you, beautiful one.”

The boy stares for a moment, but slowly slips off his futon and walks on shaky legs over to the bars. He blinks with big, dark eyes at the two men on the other side.

“Turn around,” the intern commands. He does as he’s told, head bowed and fingers twisting together in front of him. “No touching, I'm afraid,” he says to Dr. Kindasa. “He throws a fit and we can't risk him damaging him. But you may look as much as you like.”

Look, he does. The wings are small, plain and white and kind of greasy looking, but still beautiful nonetheless. They appear to be dove wings, if he’s not mistaken, proportionally about as large as they would be if the rest of the boy was a dove. Right now they’re held up in front of his body, the tops arching gently over the tops of his shoulders, the tips of the end feathers brushing his calves.

“The wings will continue to grow as he does, correct?” the scientists asks absently.

“Yes, sir.”

“Will that be painful?”

“Theoretically no more than typical growing pains, sir.”

The scientist nods, taking a few more moments to observe him in silence. “Can he fly?”

“No, sir.”

The boy’s back is a sharp contrast to the light, pretty wings. His shoulder blades stick out at sharp angles, scarlet and discolored. The area surrounding the wings is the worst – inflamed and horribly scarred, it looks painful to even have them there, let alone move them like he’s been informed he can do.

“Is he in any pain?” he blurts suddenly. The boy is standing completely still, like it pains him to move.

The intern blinks, looks taken aback. “Oh, I’m not sure.”

“You’re not  _ sure _ ?”

“Well, it’s unclear how much he can and can’t feel,” he stammers, “The area is… quite damaged. It’s possible that many of the nerve endings are too damaged.” He blinks again after, wide-eyed like he still doesn’t quite understand the question. He’s never thought about whether or not the boy is in any  _ pain, _ even though he disagrees with physical punishment. That’s more of a morality thing.

He’s seen it made rather obvious sometimes during testing, when the boy clenches his eyes and his small fists and writhes around, but always silent. Still, it was always more of an inconvenience than an indication that yes, whatever they were doing hurt quite a bit.

“Tori-chan,” the doctor says suddenly.

He turns quickly, clearly wincing but trying not to show it.

“Watch me.”

The boy blinks at him.  _ I am already watching _ , his large eyes seem to say.

The man lifts his right hand to his face, knuckles an inch or so in front of his mouth, palm toward the boy. He curls his last three fingers, then pinches his forefinger and thumb together twice. “Bird,” he says after lowering his hand. “You try.”

The intern looks on, completely baffled and unsure whether or not he should intervene. Compelled by curiosity, he remains silent.

The boy lifts own hand to his mouth and mimics the sign perfectly.

“There,” the doctor smiles. He stands and turns back to the intern. “You’d do well to teach him some more. He needs a way to communicate.”

“I – I – Yes, sir,” the scientist agrees, still a bit shocked by what he’s just seen. None of the previous subjects had any shown any desire to learn or listen, simply slept and cried and occasionally ate, too weak or disabled most of the time to do anything else. But something about this boy has always been very different.

  
  


Sendai Genetics Lab  
Date: _October 16, 2003_  
Subject Name: _N29 KW75_  
Subject Age: _5 years_  
Notes: _All tests for today are to be postponed, subject is turning five years old._  
Scheduled For Today: _Ø_  
 

Yamatsu Kenji – the intern from a year ago, he decided to stay, fascinated as he was with the longest living subject the lab has ever seen – slides the day’s sheet into the case on the door. No tests were scheduled today in the first place, he made sure of that. Even if today were not his birthday, the boy needs a day off.

He’s been crying more often, flinching at all the touches, he even went so far as to outwardly refuse to participate in a test the day before. All that was asked was that he lift his wings above his head so the man examining him could see his back, and he absolutely would not do it. The man conducting the test hit him at least once, his monitor had seen the flushed handprint on his face when he came to bring him back to his cell, and he had received no dinner as official punishment.

He picks up the tray with his breakfast on it – nothing more than a small bowl of overcooked rice and a bottle of water – and opens the door with his hip, striding into the room. He tries not to note the way the boy flinches at the sudden noise, nearly falls away from the tiny window in his cell he’d been staring out.

“Looking outside?” the young man asks.

The boy quickly shakes his head no.

“It’s all right, Tori-chan.”

He begins to shake, curling up on the futon as his hair falls to obscure his face, twisting his fingers into the hem of the tattered shirt he’s wearing. There are large slits in the back, cut by Yamatsu himself for the boy’s wings, which curl loosely around his arms.

Yamatsu moves forward and slides the tray under the bars that split the room in the half, wishing he had something more to offer. He knows the boy can survive on less food than normal despite his higher metabolism, but he looks so worryingly thin these days.

After a moment, the boy looks back and tilts his head, hair shifting both into and away from his eyes. A crease appears between his eyebrows through a gap in his hair, and he raises both hands so they’re level with the top of his head. He curls his hands into fists with only his forefingers extended, curved toward the front of the cell and the intern, then moves his hands down until they are level with his collar bones, and flattens his hands like they’re resting on a table.

_ Test? _

“No tests today,” the intern replies.

A large part of the reason he’d stayed was so that he could teach sign language to the boy. It fascinated him, both learning it and helping the child learn it as well. He didn’t feel like going too in depth with the grammar and what not, but he’d learned individual words relevant to their context and was willing to pass those on.

“Do you know what day it is?”

He shakes his head no.

Yamatsu points at the boy, then lifts his hand to hover about an inch in front of his chin, fingers spread. He reaches forward with his middle finger to touch it to his chin, then moves it down to touch his sternum. He points to the boy again when he’s finished.

“Today is your birthday,” he translates out loud.

The boy repeats the sign, touches his bottom lip first by accident. They do it back and forth a few times until he gets it.

“Birthday,” Yamatsu repeats. “Do you know how old you are?”

He holds up five fingers. He’s heard the scientists talking about it a lot lately, how no other subject has survived for five years, especially not one brought in as a newborn. He is the most successful subject they’ve had, showing no mutations (save for those they desired) and, though it shouldn’t have been as shocking as it was, a will to live.

“Very good. So there will be no testing today, you may do as you wish.”

With this he leaves the room, locking the door behind him as he’s required to do.

The boy sits in silence for a few seconds, staring at the door.  _ No tests. Birthday _ . He doesn’t see the correlation, but he’s thankful for the break. Everything hurts, and lately no matter how far away things are they seem  _ too close, _ in his space and there’s not enough room for him and –

His stomach growls. He scoots forward to the tray of food, picking up the chopsticks and digging in. He doesn’t know the rice is overcooked, he doesn’t know the water tastes like plastic because it’s been sitting in this bottle for too long. He will not be poked with needles, he will not run through a maze, he will not solve puzzles. He can rest.

When he’s done eating he returns to the window, so far above him that he has to stand on his toes and reach his arms above his head to get his fingers on the sill, and stares at the sky until his legs are shaking and he’s forced to sit.

  
  


Sendai Genetics Lab  
Date: _May 20, 2004_  
Subject Name: _N29 KW75_  
Subject Age: _5 years 7 months 4 days_  
Notes: _Subject has strange preoccupation with stars, insists on learning about them_  
Scheduled For Today: _Muscle endurance testing 09:00am-11:00am, Wing performance testing 11:30am-12:30am_  
 

“Do you remember the sign for moon?”

The boy holds his right hand up to his right eye, forefinger and thumb in a C shape, the rest of his fingers curled into a fist. He moves his hand out for a moment before going up in a swooping motion.

“Very good. How about moonlight?”

He repeats the sign for moon, then folds the tip of his thumb over the tip of his middle finger and moves his hand down, opening his fingers as he goes.

“Excellent.”

The boy’s lips twitch up for an instant in what might be a smile. Praise is not something he’s used to getting.

Yamatsu checks his watch as the boy begins fiddling with his hands, a nervous habit he’s developed that consists partially of fingerspelling and partially of nervous tremors. They are expected on the fourth floor in ten minutes. “Come along, Tori-chan,” Yamatsu sighs, standing from the chair he’s set up in the corner of the room, “Time for another test.”

He flinches away from the bars, wings curling instinctively tighter around himself. He’d returned from a test not half an hour ago, two hours long and every second was awful.  _ Muscle endurance. _ How long can he run? How many pushups can he do, sit ups, chin ups, until he’s coughing up blood and gasping for air. He’s been slowly sipping water for the past hour – rationing it, he doesn’t get more than two bottles a day, maximum.

“I know, I know. Only for an hour.”

The boy extends his wings the tiniest bit, fluttering them lightly.  _ Wing test? _ He doesn’t think the rest of his body could go through anything else today.

“Yes, wing test. Now let’s go, or you’ll be late.”

 

Sendai Genetics Lab  
Date: _January 4, 2006_  
Subject Name: _N29 KW75_  
Subject Age: _7 years 2 months 19 days_  
Notes: _Subject has been uncooperative since Yamatsu-san was fired. Punishments have begun to take a physical toll._  
Scheduled For Today: _Wing performance testing 07:00 am-0:9:30 am, Blood work 09:45am-11:00am, Endurance Testing 11:30am-12:00pm, Overall performance 12:15pm-2:00pm_  
 

Both knees and one hand with fingers spread press into the sterile tile floor, the cool porcelain providing little comfort. His other hand clutches his stomach as he throws up nothing but bile.

His wings ache – he doesn’t know how they can still perform tests on them after four years, but they can, and they can find new ways to make it hurt every time.

His muscles ache – thousands of miles he’s run through mazes, the floor shocking his feet when he stops to catch his breath or try to think. Thousands of drills he’s completed, testing his reflexes and agility and instincts.

There isn’t an athlete in the world who’d be able to keep up with him. Him, a seven-year-old child.

He’s woozy and lightheaded from how much blood was taken from him earlier, and now he’s had to run three more laps around a track so they could take notes on  _ something _ he doesn’t understand because apparently they get different results post-exertion, but he physically  _ couldn’t. _

He stares at the bile on the floor below him, clear, nothing more than spit and bitterness and he hopes one day he’ll just choke –

“What’s this? Get him up!”

“Sir, with all due respect,” the new intern begins, hesitantly. He’s not cold, heartless like the scientists, but he’s by no means kind like Yamatsu had grown to almost be. He just has to keep the boy alive. “He has been getting progressively weaker, I’m not sure he can handle anything else today –”

“I don’t care,” the scientist barks. He’s a heavier man with thinning hair. The boy finds him quite ugly. “If he cannot perform to the fullest, we will find a replacement!”

“This is his fullest, please, sir, he just needs to rest.”

No one can replace him and they both know it, everyone knows it. He is one of a kind, entirely unique, the peak of scientific creation. They're killing him.

The scientist monitoring him glares down for a moment at the pathetic sight; the boy is curled on his side in the fetal position now, shaking. “Fine. Get him out of here. We will begin tomorrow from the top, oh-seven-hundred sharp!”

“There might be other –”

“Reschedule them.”

“...Yes, sir.” The monitor bows deeply for several seconds, then crouches beside the boy. “Come along, Tori-chan…”

  
  


Sendai Genetics Lab  
Date: _March 30, 2007_  
Subject Name: _N29 KW75_  
Subject Age: _8 years 5 months 15 days_  
Notes: _Subject was attacked by Orochi-san yesterday. Injuries are not severe, though they have hindered his performance greatly. Physical wounds should heal completely within five to six weeks, unknown how long mental repair will take._  
Scheduled For Today: _Ø_  
 

The monitor slides the sheet into the case on the door and steps into the room. Breakfast will not come for another hour, but after yesterday’s incident – one of the scientists became overcome with rage at the boy’s uncooperativeness and viciously attacked him – he is sent in every hour to make sure he remains stable. Or, as stable as he ever is.

For a moment, he fears the boy may be dead.

He lies on his side on the futon, facing the front of the room. Every limb is completely limp, one wing flopped behind him on the floor, the other draped haphazardly over as much of his body as possible, like a blanket. One eye is swollen shut, the skin shining indigo and olive. The other is completely glassy and blank, not blinking, tracking no movement.

Other bruises litter his face and arms, extending down his torso and peeking out from beneath his clothes, from between the feathers of his wing. They reappear unhidden down his legs, a rainbow of pain that mars his otherwise milky skin.

The feathers of his wings are crumpled and dirty, spotted with blood near their roots on his back. The intern was able to wipe the worst of it away when he spent over an hour in the infirmary with the boy, trying not to injure him further as he cleaned scrapes and wrapped bandages around the cuts on his arms and legs. One of those bandages sits on his upper arm, several thick layers of gauze that have soaked through with blood in some spots.

He’s completely still, and for one, terrifying moment the monitor doesn’t think he’s breathing. But then he sucks in a harsh breath, chokes on it, sputters and coughs and slowly pushes himself to his hands and knees on shaking arms.

The monitor stares in mild horror as the boy retches, back arching like a cat and wings curling around his body as if they’ll protect him. He never vomits, but the intern thinks it would be less painful if he did, at least offer an end to this horrible wet coughing.

Eventually he stops, flopping bonelessly back onto his side and staring at the monitor with a face of stone. Nothing but apathy.  _ You could kill me right now,  _ that face says,  _ You could do it, and it would be a relief. _

It’s one of the only things to truly scare the man since he began working here. In the end he brings breakfast an hour early, adds an extra bowl of fresh rice out of his own lunch.

 

Sendai Genetics Lab  
Date: _September 12, 2007_  
Subject Name: _N29 KW75_  
Subject Age: _8 years 10 months 27 days_  
Notes: _There has been talk of the lab being shut down, unknown how this will effect subject or if the government is even aware of his existence_  
Scheduled For Today: _Blood work 09:30am-10:00am, Wing performance 10:15am-11:00am_  
 

The day’s tests are all over. They have been over for nearly twelve hours, but despite the exhaustion turning his lightweight bones to lead, he cannot sleep.

His body aches, but lying on the thin futon on the floor only makes him ache more. The floor beneath it is cold, a solid slate of dark stone that scrapes up his arms when he’s thrown into his cell or pushed through the bars. He has spent the last few hours tossing and turning as his eyes and back burn.

So he stands on his toes, a fair bit closer to the window than he was when he was only five years old, and peers out into the night sky, far above him. He absently finger-spells the words for moon, stars, sky, sun, anything he can think of as he stares up at the glittering points of light. They are worlds away from him, in this tiny cell with appendages he shouldn’t have ripping through his skin and marking him somehow lower than the monsters who put them there.

  
  


Sendai Genetics Lab  
Date: _December 2, 2007_  
Subject Name: _N29 KW75_  
Subject Age: _9 years 1 months 16 days_  
Notes: _Subject is acting up again. Showing early signs of anxiety disorders, frankly to be expected_  
Scheduled For Today: _Wing performance 8:30am-9:30am_  
 

The boy stands in the center of the observation room, his wiggling toes on the cold tile floor the only thing moving. His fingers are locked together in front of him, muscles rigid, but he knows precisely where everything is. The only door, which he came through just a few minutes ago, stands to the left, thick and uncompromising steel. Beside it: a security guard, equally unmoving.

To the right, a scientist is still going over the last session’s notes, moving closer to inspect the boy. His mumbling and the sounds of shuffling paper fill the room. The boy shies away every time the man gets closer, though he does his best to hide it. If it’s decided he’s being uncooperative he’ll be hit, probably given no food in the evening.

Behind him is the only piece of furniture in the room: a table covered in tools and equipment he does his best never to look at. Needles and a multitude of sharp blades, pliers, tweezers, scissors, hooks, all of them arranged perfectly and sterilized to a shine.

The scientist finishes going over his notes, places the clipboard on the edge of the table. “Lift your wings,” he commands, latex gloves snapping over his wrists. The boy flinches horribly at the sound, but tries to quickly lift his wings. They’re trembling, and he squeezes his eyes shut as he prays the scientist doesn’t comment on it.

As usual, he receives the opposite.

“Stop your shaking,” the scientist says, but he doesn’t sound angry yet. Annoyance colors his tone, but not anger. He does his best to be still, but the tremors spread to his shoulders and arms until his fingers and chest feel shivery.

The scientist clamps a hand over the back of his neck, right above the top notch of his spine.  _ The final vertebrae that holds up your skull is called Atlas _ , Yamatsu once told him. The man’s hand feels as heavy as the world. “I told you to  _ stop _ ,” the scientist behind him growls. “You’re making this difficult for both of us.”

His head spins and he raises his hands to hold his triceps, curling forward as he suddenly finds it hard to breathe. He gasps for air, distantly feels the gross material of latex on his bare shoulder as the man attempts to force him upright again. “Pathetic child,” he spits, “Get a  _ hold  _ of yourself. You hear me?” His knees lock as tears stream down his face, can almost  _ feel _ his ribs constricting around his lungs, squeezing, squeezing –

_ Snap _ goes the man’s other hand across his cheek.

Tears slide over his face, do nothing to soothe the burning.

“Are you going to do as you're told?” the scientist asks, voice low and promising punishment if he doesn’t perform as expected.

The boy nods out of reflex because it’s the only answer he’s allowed to give. He bites his lip so hard it leaves a scab for the next three weeks, and does not shake for the rest of the hour.

  
  


Sendai Genetics Lab  
Date: _January 20, 2008_  
Subject Name: _N29 KW75_  
Subject Age: _9 years 3 months 4 days_  
Notes: _Subject has somehow learned what apple pie is. Wants some badly_  
Scheduled For Today: _Muscle endurance 12:00pm-1:00pm_  
 

_ Muscle endurance is the second worst, _ he thinks. Recently he thought it was right up at the top, but then he’d had his first wing test in a month and  _ that  _ certainly threw everything into perspective. His back hasn’t come away from a test bloody since he was six years old.

In front of him, the white of a lab coat fills his view, behind him, the sound of the guard’s heavy footsteps. He thinks about whether it would be worth it to turn around and look at him, or if he would get in trouble for it. He does a lot of thinking.  _ Will this pain ever end? What is the point of all these tests? Will this be my whole life? _

Very existential, for a nine-year-old.

As they come to a stop in front of the door of the lab where he will hurt for the next two hours, there’s a commotion at the other end of the hall. The monitor, hand raised in the air, plastic card all ready to swipe, looks up from where he was about to unlock the door. The boy looks as well, curious to see who is yelling and causing a scene in the otherwise pristine and generally quiet lab.

A scientist comes barreling around the corner, running at top speed. His hair sticks up at odd angles, pieces standing up straight and blown to the side by the wind. A stack of folders is clutched tightly to his chest. He stops in front of the small group, panting slightly and trying uselessly to pat his hair back down.

“You’ve heard tell of the government shutting us down, yes?” he pants at last.

“Yes…?”

The scientist fixes them all with a slightly manic stare. “They’re here.”

He takes off down the hallway.

“...What?” the monitor mumbles, not quite grasping the situation. “What does he mean –”

There are emergency lights on the walls, always far above the boy’s head, alternating between orange and red casing. He’s never paid them any mind before, when he has to crane his head back to look at them, but suddenly they’re flashing, blindingly bright, accompanied by blaring alarms. He immediately clamps his hands over his ears and would have fallen to the ground if not for the monitor’s hand gripping his arm.

_ “We are entering Lockdown,” _ An automated female voice says over the alarms.  _ “This is a Level Ten Emergency. We are entering Lockdown. Please return subjects to their designated areas. Please lock all doors. Please get out of the hallways as quickly as possible.” _

The monitor swears, hauls the boy to his feet and takes off down the hall, back toward the Dreaded Cell with his tiny window and thin futon. He’ll stare at the sky until the alarms stop.

They make it back to his room in only a few moments, he’s thrown back behind the bars, and he watches the monitor’s hands closely in his panic, brain scrambling to latch onto something normal. Shaking hands fumble with the key, don’t turn it fully, the cell door is still unlocked when the monitor rushes out of the room again. The light panel beside the door to the hallway remains green, doesn’t turn back to that bright flame color that he is oh so familiar with.

The hallway is filled with shouting, distantly backed by the sound of running feet. His room is quiet, cold and poorly lit like it always is.

He could leave right now.

He could be killed if discovered.

_ I would rather die than stay here any longer _ , he thinks to himself. A nine-year-old child, who has only known abuse and neglect, would rather die. Would rather never continue to grow, to make new memories, to never unlock any form of potential or accomplishment.

Slowly, hardly daring to move too fast should it cause the illusion of safety to shatter, he pushes himself to his feet, tiptoeing as quietly as he can toward the door of the cell with bare feet. He presses his fingers beside the lock, watching in awe as the door swings open under his touch. He can really do this.

Growing bolder now that he’s out of the cell, he pads toward the door to the hall, reaching up to twist the handle. It turns. He pulls it in, half expecting the door not to open despite the fact that the light is still green.

But it does open – just the tiniest bit at first because he’s having trouble breathing and his chest feels tight – then more, and he peeks around into the hallway to see what’s happening.

Scientists rush back and forth, with papers clutched to their chests and the alarms still wailing over their heads. No one pays any mind to him, no one can hear the creak of the door over the shouting and pounding of feet and those  _ damn alarms. _

He’ll be seen, no doubt, if he tries to leave. Of course he’ll be seen, with all these people around. Even if there wasn’t attention being drawn to his  _ wings _ , a small child kind of stands out among a bunch of scientists.

He closes the door. (Not all the way.)

A plan.

He needs a plan.

There is a sweatshirt on his futon, given to him by Yamatsu years ago when he noticed the way the boy was always shivering in the mornings. The cold stone of the room offered no heat. The sweatshirt is absolutely huge, since the old monitor knew he would quickly outgrow any clothes he bought him and he didn’t want to risk sneaking in a new one every time he outgrew them. So he bought it several sizes too big, content with the knowledge that it would last him several years.

(The straw colored fabric has begun to wear thin, but it has remained soft and comforting.)

The boy scampers back to his futon, quickly grabs the hoodie, and jumps back out of the cell, irrationally afraid that it will close and lock him in there. Standing by the door again, he yanks it over his head, pulling his wings tight against the slits in his t-shirt to make it fit. When it’s settled on his small frame, the hem falls past his hips and butt, leaving only a few centimeters of his charcoal shorts visible. If he shuffles his wings around just right, he can keep them mostly hidden.

He wiggles his toes against the cold floor. He can do this.

He opens the door again, peering out. If anything, the hall has only gotten more chaotic. Men in military uniforms march up and down, speaking into headsets and barging through other doors in the hall. Several whiz past that are flat out chasing scientists and the boy has to repress a smile.

Carefully, he slips into the hallway, begins ducking and running with basically no goal in mind. He doesn’t know how to get out of here, he has never been outside the building. He’s been in rooms full of windows, rooms on upper floors with no ceiling, just the sky above him, or small courtyards, but he has never seen this place from the outside.

“Hey!” someone shouts behind him. He keeps running. Surely they aren’t yelling at him, everyone is screaming back and forth at each other, no one can even see him. “Hey, kid!” He freezes, chest clenching and breath leaving his lungs.

He’s trying to breathe when arms are suddenly around him and he tries to scream, but all that escapes is a rush of air and it’s more of a gasp. The person holding him shifts around for a moment until he’s balanced on the man’s – it’s a man now, he can tell by the strong jaw and thick eyebrows and slight stubble on his chin – hip, one arm around his lower back to keep him in place and the other pressing against the earpiece on the other side of his face. He calms down. This isn’t a scientist.

“I’ve just secured another child, sir. No older than eight years old, I’d say.” The boy furrows his eyebrows and holds up nine fingers. The man glances at him before looking back to the hallway ahead. “Nine years old,” he amends. “I’m bringing him out front with the others now, sir.” He takes his hand away from the earpiece and begins jogging, bouncing the boy on his hip. It kind of hurts. He doesn’t complain.

Counting every step they take, he tries to match his breathing to the rhythm – in for three steps, out for three steps – as they head toward what he assumes is the front of the building. He has never been in this part of the building before, but it’s different from the labs he grew up in. Brighter. Warmer. All high ceilings and open glass and sleek steel.

There are glass doors straight ahead of them, he can see large black trucks and a group of kids – all ages, from what he can see, youngest maybe four, the oldest no doubt in their teens – huddled in front of them.

They run through the front doors and the boy gasps in lung fulls of fresh air, closes his eyes for a second to relish in the feel of the cold air on his face. The man jogs over to the group of kids and places him down on the asphalt, patting his shoulder before running back in.

He looks up. The sky above him is vast but gray, covered completely with clouds, the winter sun hidden from view. There are birds, with wings like his only dark as night, flying in a pack. He watches as they soar from right to left, then bank and form an obscure cloud, continue up, and up, until they’re nothing but tiny specs and he wishes his wings served some purpose so he could fly away too.

He looks to the left. Between the gaps in the trucks surrounding them, he can see that the parking lot stretches for quite a ways, filled, obviously, with cars covered in dust and dry from the roads. Beyond the parking lot: forest, in every direction. The wind bites at his cheeks and ears, makes his teeth click together despite how he’s used to being cold. The trucks provide a bit of protection, but there is no one in them, no guards standing to watch him and the others.

He looks down. His bare toes curl and uncurl against the pavement, scraping against the loose pebbles. He lifts one foot, inspects the few platinum stones pressed into his skin before brushing them off and back to the ground. It's freezing, he wishes he at least had some socks.

He looks, finally, to the right. He’s standing next to one of the older kids, a tall girl with wild blond hair tied away from her face and fierce jade eyes. She’s wearing blue jeans and a black hoodie, and is speaking quickly in a language he doesn’t recognize with the boy beside her. Feeling eyes on her, she stops talking and turns to look down at the boy. She hisses something in that language he doesn’t know, all hard consonants and tongue. He stares back at her, eyes wide and a little confused.

“You speak Japanese?” she demands, and he can understand her now. He nods. “Okay. I  _ said _ , you got a name?”

He has a lot of names.  _ N29 KW75, 75, Tori-chan, Brat, GMO… Kozume. _ He doesn’t know how to tell her this, and he doesn’t really have one set name to be called like he knows people should, so he just kind of shrugs.

She makes an unimpressed sort of noise with her throat, then her eyes catch briefly on his wings, extending from the hem of his sweatshirt to brush the backs of his knees. She raises one eyebrow but doesn’t comment on them when she leans down to hiss in his face. “We’re getting out of here. I don't wanna stick around to see whatever the government plans to do with us. Are you in, or are you out?”

He has a feeling there is only one response he’s allowed to give.  _ I’m in _ , he wants to say, but he can’t, so he takes a small step forward and touches the sleeve of her sweatshirt.

“In, then.”

He nods.

“Can you run?”

_ God _ , can he run. He could run laps around his building until the sun went down. But his body is shaking with a mix of fear and adrenaline, he’s dizzy every other second, and these kids are older than him. Much older. Their legs are much longer. They’ve probably been training like he has, are probably so, so much faster…

He lifts his right hand, pointing his thumb, forefinger and middle finger toward the girl and curling his last two. He quickly closes his three extended fingers together.

_ No _ .

The girl blinks. “The hell was that?”

“Was that sign language?” the boy on her other side asks, leaning around to see the young boy. “That was sign language, Micky. Do it again.”

He repeats the sign.

“He says no. Can’t run? That’s gonna be a problem.”

“If he wants out, I’m not leaving him here,” the girl growls. Micky, he called her. That’s not a Japanese name. He wonders what it is. They switch back to that other language, voices rising and growing angry for a moment before the guy huffs and snaps something that seems to end the argument. “Jack’s gonna carry you,” Micky says when she turns back around.

He nods once, slowly.

“You okay with that?”

He nods again, tries to be more enthusiastic this time.

“Good, let’s go.” She steps away and suddenly the other guy – Jack, also tall, rumpled brown hair and a similar outfit to the girl – is standing where she was, bending down to scoop the boy up and sling him onto his back. His hands come to rest under his thighs and he instinctively wraps his arms around the guy’s shoulders to hold himself up.

“Ready?” he asks. Overwhelmed, the boy buries his face in his shoulder and nods.

They’ve barely taken a single step when the door bursts open, and a man in the same uniform as the one who got him out is standing there, staring at them in confusion. “Hey!” he barks, rushing forward when they start to run.

There are large hands on the boy’s sides, pulling him away, and he tries to scream in pain as his wings are crushed at weird angles. He’s yanked away from Jack, who stumbles at the change in weight. He expects him to just keep running, but he uses the momentum to swing around and punch the soldier now holding him right in the face.

He stumbles, falls backward but doesn’t let go of the boy. He winces as they hit the ground, his back to the man’s chest as his weight knocks the breath from both of them. Micky screams something at them that he doesn’t understand, but he hears Jack’s name and the panic in her voice. He screams something back, grabs the dark haired boy and books it.

They yell back and forth to each other as they take off at a dead sprint toward the trees, flying past cars and across the pavement. They have shoes on, he takes a moment to notice before squeezing his eyes shut and trying to breathe.

Trucks rumble to life behind them, and Micky swears in Japanese over the pounding of their shoes. “The trees,” she pants. The boy sees them getting closer, but doesn’t understand why she’s called attention to them.

“I know,” Jack huffs back.

The younger boy can’t hear their shoes anymore suddenly, but they’re definitely still running. He lifts his head to see that they’re surrounded by trees, the parking lot turned to dirt beneath their feet. He raises his head more to see over Jack’s shoulder, sees the huge building that makes up the lab disappearing behind trees, sees the army trucks pulling to a stop at the edge of the woods, unable to follow them.

Jack and Micky keep running.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> all those dates and ages match up perfectly, you're welcome


	3. Is This The End I Feel

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WARNING multiple (vague) accounts of child molestation and implied noncon, and prostitution. these sections will be indicated with ***
> 
> when i was writing this i was reading a book called The Things They Carried. it's a book about a group of men's experience surrounding the vietnam war, and each chapter is what's called a vignette
> 
> vignette  
> noun  
> a brief evocative description, account, or episode
> 
> i liked the style and tried to mimic it a bit in this story, but especially in this chapter

Jack and Micky are apparently half American, and they speak English. They're both around seventeen or so, though they look much older to him at nine years old, and they seem to know how to operate in the outside world. They don’t have any physical modifications that he can see, but they’re both stronger than he thinks they should be, and faster. In the little time they’re together they teach him a lot.

He learns to read and write, how to operate a computer and how money works, though they never have very much of it. He learns how to fold his wings completely flat against his back so they can even fit under his pants, how to pickpocket, to stay away from dark alleys, and Jack teaches him what little bit of sign language he also knows.

But the boy isn't interested in sticking around with them any longer than he needs to. They're fairly nice to him, and he can tell they're trying, but the fact is that they're not parents. They're just teenagers, raised in a lab like he was (though treated significantly better for some reason the boy will never know), and they're more interested in getting jobs and finding a place to live and food to eat than they are in taking care of a nine-year-old.

He can tell they're getting sick of him, too. Jack gets this annoyed look in his eyes whenever he sees him, and Micky gets it when she sees either of them. They start fighting a lot more, seriously instead of just fast-paced quips and arguments in English. They're lying to him, and to each other, and they leave him alone for longer and longer until eventually, he can't take it.

At nine years, ten months, and eight days, he packs what little possessions he's gained and disappears.

He does not miss them.

 

 **August 2008**  
**9 years old**

He's crouched on the ground, warm grass between his toes, hot sun on his wings, staring intently forward. A bird hops around a meter or two in front of him, pecking at the ground and fluttering its wings. Every time the bird does it, he does it as well, mimicking the ruffling feathers under his shirt to the best of his ability.

He clenches his fingers around the stale bread in his palm, feels it crumble, then holds it out in front of him. The bird looks up, stares at him with its head tilted. It hops forward once, then again, head tipping toward the bread instead of the face of the boy holding it. It hops forward again, then a child screams in the park behind him and the bird is immediately above the trees, leaving wind and scattered bread and a disappointed child in its wake.

 

 **September 2008**  
**9 years old**

He likes climbing trees. It's easy, and he likes how the foliage makes him invisible but doesn’t impair his own vision.

Lately, the trees have started to change, their leaves going from emerald to amber and ruby and topaz; he’s fascinated. The next time he finds himself near a library he Googles ‘why do the trees change’ and reads about chlorophyll and pigments until the staff tells him the library is closing.

Now he sits up high, uses the secluded space to stretch his wings out the tiniest bit, lets them push against the fabric of his shirt until he’s afraid it will tear and he stops. The wind blows – more of a biting fall rush than a lazy summer breeze – and he longs for his yellow sweatshirt, tucked away with the rest of his things in a hollow log just a bit deeper into the woodsy area of the park.

Children run and laugh below him, playing games and chasing bugs, hats and scarves and gloves abandoned with their parents since they’re so warm from running around. He wishes he could feel that warmth again. He wishes he could go play with them, but he’s long since stopped trying. Too many parents herding their children away from the strange, dirty boy with wings had scared him away plenty. So he sits in his tree, and he watches them run.

 

 **November 2008 *****  
**10 years old**

This is probably the worst shelter he’s stayed in yet. He’s curled up on top of his backpack full of clothes and food, because any other position means his stuff gets stolen. (He learned that a month ago, learned it the hard way.) There’s no section for unaccompanied minors like there is in most of the shelters he's stayed in, so his futon is squished between the wall and that of a man who was staring at him earlier in a way that made his skin prickle.

He lies on his side, back to the wall with his wings curled tightly around him, and runs his thumb over a zipper on his backpack, trying to let the motion calm him enough to sleep.

 

 **November 2008 *****  
**10 years old**

The morning greets him with teary eyes and an unpleasant taste in his mouth, the sound of a pants zipper and a sore throat. It’s his first experience of many.

 

 **December 2008**  
**10 years old**

Everyone around him is talking about Christmas. He sees is advertised in stores, on television displays, hears it on the lips of people on street corners and in the shelters. He knows – from Yamatsu and Micky and Jack – that it's a holiday, originally for Christians, but kind of for everybody. You’re supposed to give and receive gifts from people you care about. He wishes he had someone to exchange gifts with.

 

 **February 2009**  
**10 years old**

He toes the fragile line of freezing to death under a bridge, the cold makes his muscles and his wings ache where they grow from his back.

 

 **March 2009**  
**10 years old**

He survives his first winter, however harsh it was.

 

 **August 2009**  
**10 years old**

There is a girl in her late teens, a year or two away from being twice his own age, with gentle wavy onyx hair that falls past her shoulders, smiling eyes behind glasses, and a beauty mark below her lip. When she was about the same age the boy is now, she lost her parents – all he knows are vague facts about a car crash – and has been frequenting one of the shelters the boy rotates between on a regular basis. She always smiles when people catch her eye, does not avoid him because of his wings, and she is deaf.

The boy stares, fascinated, at her hands. Her fingers are short but thin, both from lack of proper nutrition and a lifetime of rapidly moving them. He knows by now that he is supposed to watch her face and keep her hands in his peripheral vision, but he doesn’t know nearly enough sign language for that, and even staring like this he can only catch a word every now and then.

Orange polish decorates her nails – chipped, nearly gone – flecked with black sparkles. He wonders where she got them done, if she went to that place down the street that he knows paints nails, or if she perhaps had a friend do them, or did them herself.

Every time she lifts her left hand there is a flash of silver; a ring given to her by an old friend sits on her index finger. He can’t focus on it much now, but he knows from looking at it in the past that it’s two thin bands of silver twisting over and over each other in multiple infinity signs, tiny white diamonds pressed into the metal every time it crosses itself.

She is one of the first truly beautiful things he comes across in this world.

 

 **October 2009**  
**11 years old**

Someone has left a pumpkin on the park bench. The carving is simple but lovely, just the side view of Totoro from the Studio Ghibli crest.

He recognizes it because he has a dirty plush of the beloved forest spirit, given to him by a little girl who noticed him sitting alone against a tree in a park. Her mother had intervened almost immediately upon noticing who her daughter was talking to, but there had been enough time for her to hand him the plush and chirp, “Now you won’t be alone!”

The boy edges closer, breathes in the smell of singed pumpkin, finds that he adores it. It’s just sitting to the far side of the bench, flickering slightly in the dimming autumn light. He wonders who would take the time out of their day to carve such a beautiful pumpkin only to leave it in the park.

He finds several more scattered around the area over the course of a few days.

 

 **April 2010**  
**11 years old**

It’s  _ humiliating _ , more than anything.

The air still nips at his bare ears in the mornings and evenings, before and after the sun provides its heat. He’s shivers in his now threadbare straw sweatshirt and stolen scarf, wings hidden. Knees up to his chest, arms hanging straight over them, mostly empty cup balanced between his fingers. He shakes it sometimes, partially to listen to the rattle of coins and hope the people walking past it can hear it too, partially because the occasional tremor shocks through his bones and he doesn’t have a choice.

_ “Dirty beggar.” _

 

 **May 2010**  
**11 years old**

“Okaa-san, he has wings.”

The boy stiffens so fast some of his joints crack in protest. The girl’s voice is coming from behind him, toward the front door of the library. He is crouched on the floor, scanning the spines of books about dragons.

“Don’t be silly, dear,” the mother replies in a hushed and dismissive tone, “People don’t have wings.”

“He does, though,” the little girl insists. “Look, look, there are holes in his shirt, he has bird wings.”

Slowly, he turns around to look at the girl and her mother over his shoulder, watching as the mother looks up from the book she’s inspecting. “Oh!” she gasps upon seeing him. She shoos her daughter behind her legs. “It must be one of those genetically modified…  _ things _ made by that awful lab that got shut down a few years ago.”

“Lab?” the girl asks curiously, still staring at the boy crouched on the ground. His heart is pounding in his ears, and he hasn’t felt this level of fear in so long he almost forgot what it felt like.

“Stay away from him, Kimi-chan.”

 

 **October 2010**  
**12 years old**

He signs happy birthday to himself until there are tears in his eyes and his arms get tired and he wonders, not for the first time and not for the last, if he’s cursed to stay alone and in silence until the day he dies.

 

 **December 2010**  
**12 years old**

The Brand New iPhone 3gs is the gift of the year, apparently. It looks amazing, but he has never had that much money to his name in his entire life, let alone at one time. His grubby fingerprints mark up the window of the store until the owner comes out to tell him off.

 

 **April 2011**  
**12 years old**

He’d been crouched on the ground, drawing a small bug in the dirt when he’d heard a shout, seen a group of four kids around his age pointing at him with wide eyes. He’s near a school, but didn’t think anything of it until these kids came out.

He’d fled as soon as he caught sight of them, taken shelter behind a tree that he’d already scaled by the time they ran around it looking for him. Now they’re parked in the grass as he listens from the branches. The leaves are still coming in, not entirely enough to obscure him, so he only hopes they don’t look up.

“My dad says it’s not a human,” one boy snickers behind his hand.

“I heard it wasn’t born, that it got  _ made _ ,” another one chimes in.

“Made? What do you mean?” a girl asks.

“Like in that lab,” the last boy says. “We weren’t born when it was a good lab, my older brother said it used to make good stuff. Anyway, it’s been all run down for like, all our lives.”

“Your older brother is a liar!” the first boy yells.

“No, he’s not!”

“Hey,” the second boy speaks up again,  _ “I  _ heard this one can’t even speak. My mom says he’s been living in this area for like,  _ ever.” _

“This one?” the girl echoes. He’s curious why she seems to know nothing about him, but also why these boys  _ do. _ “How many are there?”

“A whole bunch of ‘em escaped when the government shut down the lab. Now they’re just running around Japan, I guess.”

“Did your older brother tell you that too?”

“Shut up, Mikoshiba!”

“Haha, make me!”

The third boy swings a punch, Mikoshiba ducks, laughing, and the topic is dropped.

 

 **April 2011**  
**12 years old**

He thinks, for the first time in a long time, about names. With all the insults and technical terms thrown at him in the lab, he easily forgot what Yamatsu told him once: his file said that he had a family name, but no given name.  _ Kozume _ .

He has a pen and some old newspapers that he carries, he draws a lot of ‘lone claws.’

 

 **July 2011 *****  
**12 years old**

He’s sitting on the steps leading up to a loud, smelly bar the first time a man approaches him and offers him 3,000 yen for a blowjob.

He knows what that means, and he knows he’s technically given one before. He knows he hated it with every fiber of being, he knows it made him feel sick for days afterward, like he was the scum of the earth, like he would never be clean again.

He knows 3,000 yen is a lot of money.

Skin cold in opposition to the warmth of the night, he chokes down bitter, disgusting liquid as he tries to think of how much food 3,000 yen can buy him.

 

 **November 2011**  
**13 years old**

He’d forgotten how beautiful the trees are when they change color.

He’d forgotten how cold the air is when winter begins its descent.

He walks along the sidewalk of the downtown area where all the shops are, absolutely freezing in his thin t-shirt and jeans. He’s finally outgrown his precious yellow hoodie from Yamatsu after his last growth spurt, and what money he’d been saving up for a new one was stolen a few weeks ago in a shelter. He put on a brave face and started saving again, but at this rate, he won’t have enough until  _ spring  _ rolls around.

He stops in front of a clothing store, peering at the hoodies they have on display in the front window. They look so warm… He remembers he once went into a store with Micky, she told him to distract the cashier while she looked around. He didn’t realize until they’d left that she had stuffed two shirts under the hoodie she was wearing.

Before he has a chance to think about it, he’s inside the store, wandering through the racks of clothing. How on earth is he going to get a sweatshirt out of here? There’s nothing to hide it under, and the clerk definitely saw him when he came in, would know that he was clearly not wearing one of the hoodies on the racks. He wishes he had a bag or something to stuff it in.

He wonders if he could get the clerk to pity him. Let the dirty, freezing boy take a sweatshirt, pay for it on the house, or do nothing at all. Cover what he doesn’t have when he makes a big show of attempting to count out his change on the counter. It’s worked before, but he isn’t a cute little kid anymore.

He’s taller and painfully skinny and he hasn’t had a shower in at least a week, because the shelter he likes is full and the only open one is full of bad memories and perverts. And if the cashier knows what he is, what  _ everyone  _ seems to know he is, he probably wouldn’t let him buy it rightfully anyway. His wings have grown too much for him to hide them under a too big sweatshirt, and he doesn’t have anything that fits right anyway.

He rubs the fabric of the sweatshirt in front of him between his fingers – it’s thick, soft, a dusty ultramarine – before he leaves the shop empty handed.

 

 **November 2011**  
**13 years old**

At ten am a kid in a shelter punches him in the stomach and then in the face and walks away laughing.

At ten pm he steals all the money out of the boy’s bag and runs as far as he can before his legs give out.

 

 **November 2011**  
**13 years old**

Twenty-four hours after he was punched, he finds that he has more than enough for the sweatshirt and a swelling bruise on his face.

 

 **February 2011 *****  
**13 years old**

The train is sometimes the only thing that keeps him alive in the winter.

He rattles back and forth in the cold car like one of the last few tic-tacs in the box, ignoring the pleasant announcements that ring above his head. It’s toward the end of the evening rush hour, so the train is full enough that he needs to stand, but not so full that they’re packed in like sardines. Most people tend to give him a bit of a berth anyway. He’s clean today, at least, but his wings are wrapped around him, warding off most people.

A man stands behind him, holding the pole with one hand, his briefcase held in place between the pole and his foot. His suit is gray like his eyes, which droop like that of a poor, miserable businessman on a train at the end of the rush hour.

The boy ignores him.

At least, until his hand lands on his ass.

He jumps away at first, unsure how to react, convincing himself it was just an accident. They don’t look at each other, and the boy goes back to staring into space.

It happens again, this time more of an actual grab than just a touch. He stiffens, still unsure what to do. He gets the feeling this man isn’t going to pay him like others have. He gets the feeling he doesn’t really have a choice, like he never has.

Two stops pass as man kneads at the flesh of his ass. As the third approaches, he slips his hand further in, between the boy’s legs. His fingers poke and prod at the loose material of his pants, allowing them all sorts of places they shouldn’t be. When the train jerks into motion again at the third stop, they both shift enough that the man’s hand comes practically in contact with his balls.

The boy welcomes the freezing blast of air as he steps off at the fourth stop, tears in his eyes and phantom fingers between his thighs.

 

 **May 2012**  
**13 years old**

There’s a vacancy at a children’s shelter.

He’s never felt so  _ blessed, _ he’s been sleeping in the tunnel of a playground for the past ten days, knows that he  _ reeks  _ like sweat and he’s forgotten the color of his own skin, caked as it is with dirt. His wings are filthy and greasy like his hair, and his left shoulder aches if he tries to lift his arm above his head.

The deaf girl with the beauty mark promises to watch his stuff, and he spends almost an hour in the shower, scrubbing his fingers through his hair, rubbing the bar of soap up and down his arms and legs and sides and anywhere he can reach. He twists his wings around as much as he can in the cramped stall, digs his fingers into the feathers and pushes the water through. The floor is covered in dirt when he’s done, but he finally feels alive again.

 

 **June 2012**  
**13 years old**

It’s  _ hot _ .

People have been talking about how this is the hottest it’s been in over a decade or something. It’s all over the news, flowing between people on the streets, mumbled with great effort by people sweltering below him in the shelter. They huddle around the puny air conditioner with their fans out and most of their clothes off. This is the literal hottest day of his life.

He’s on the roof, though, because he can’t stand being around that many people packed together so tightly, not since he spent the winter jumping turnstiles and shaking on trains. The roof is always clear.

One of the people who runs the shelter keeps a sort of garden, with dozens of large potted plants scattered around and providing shade. He likes to come up here to be alone, when he doesn’t want to go to the park or wander the streets for whatever reason. He likes to draw the plants as well, but it’s too hot for that right now.

There’s a low wall off to one side of the roof, huge potted bonsais sitting on it and providing enough shade for the boy to stretch out on the lawn chair. His shirt lies abandoned in his backpack, lying on the end of the chair. He never goes anywhere without either bringing everything he owns or hiding it in a deep area of forest.

He’s lying on his stomach, one arm and one leg hanging carelessly off the chair, his other arm bent under his face and his other foot touching his backpack to make sure it’s still there. His wings are spread open wide, partially to provide more shade but mostly because no matter how hot it is, the sun feels good on them.

Nearby, a stray cat lies sprawled out in the sun, purring.

The building’s generator is right on the other side of the wall, and the low hum is enough to block out pretty much any other noise. He doesn’t hear the old wooden stairs creaking, and he doesn’t hear the quiet, “Oh,” issued from the boy who climbs them. He doesn’t hear anything until the footsteps are less than two meters away from him.

He jolts, falling to the right and rolling away from the other person, smacking half his body into the concrete wall. The rough pebbles scrape up the sensitive skin of his back and crush his wings in an odd way. What would be a shout of surprise leaves his throat instead as a breathy sigh, and he would be embarrassed if his heart wasn’t trying to snap his sternum.

The boy standing over him can’t be much older than him, maybe a year or two tops. He’s got this hair that’s such an odd mix of blond and beige that it looks  _ gray _ , like a silver coin, like the silver moon. A small piece of it sticks straight up in the front.  _ Odd _ . Beneath his eye is a delicate beauty mark.

His hands are up in front of him in what looks like a sign of surrender, and his face looks calm and open, if a little bit shocked at the boy’s reaction.

“Hello,” he says softly when the winged boy has stopped thrashing about in an attempt to sit himself up and prepare to run. “Hi. I’m sorry for disturbing you.”

He can’t respond. By now he knows that he can’t speak, has stopped trying, but usually, he would at least  _ attempt  _ to lift a hand in greeting or shift his normally impassive face into some kind of smile. But he can’t. All he’s capable of is staring at the boy above him, chest heaving while he tries to catch his breath.

The boy bows the tiniest bit, smile still in place. “My name is Sugawara Koushi.”

_ Kozume _ , he imagines saying in return. He hasn’t thought about that word in a long time.

“Don’t you speak?” Sugawara asks when he straightens again after being met with only silence, then immediately slaps his hand over his mouth. “Oh! I’m so sorry, that was rude of me. You don’t have to talk to me if you don’t want to.”

His silence seems to be making Sugawara a little nervous.

“Are you deaf?” he asks, right hand nervously fluttering up to point at the boy, then moving his index finger from the side of his chin to his ear.

He shakes his head no.

“Are you unable to speak, or do you just not want to?”

He stares. How is he supposed to answer that? The answer is a mixture of both, anyway. In the end he just… shakes his head no again. He doesn’t know what to do, can still hardly think past the rushing in his ears.

“Right, okay, I’m sorry,” Sugawara sighs. He sits down where he is, slumping and resting his head on his hand, elbow balanced on his knee. “I’m usually so good with people, I suppose you surprised me as much as I surprised you.”

The boy blinks at him, lets his coffee hair fall in front of his face. How did he surprise him when he was just lying up here, oblivious and minding his own business. Sugawara is rather cute, now that the boy is not too busy being scared shitless. He feels his cheeks warming even more than they already are, and hopes his blush is excusable because of the sun.

“Let’s start over, shall we?”

_ I guess… _

Sugawara straightens his back, wipes away the conflicting emotions on his face with a clean smile. “I’m Sugawara Koushi,” he announces again. “You can call me Suga. Or rather, think of me as Suga. Do you know how to fingerspell? If you spell your name slowly, I’ll be able to read it.”

He hesitates. No one has ever asked for his name, not since that Last Day at the lab. He can no longer call to mind the full code that was his identification, and just giving Suga the number 75 won’t sit right with either of them. He doesn’t want to be just a number, a subject.

There is Tori-chan… that’s what Jack and Micky called him sometimes, if they were in a good enough mood to call him something other than Kid or just You.

(Kozume, his  _ name _ , feels far too personal to just give away to this equally calming and nervous and beautiful boy he met on a rooftop.)

Eventually, he lifts his right hand and slowly spells T-O-R-I.

“Tori?” Suga echoes, and he nods. Suga smiles a little. “I think that suits you.”

 

 **July 2012**  
**13 years old**

He likes Sugawara Koushi.

(He likes him a  _ lot, _ but tries not to dwell on it.)

Suga is homeless, just like he is, but it’s for entirely different reasons.

His mother was a kind woman, born in China with naturally gray hair like Suga’s, and a whole body covered in moles like the one that decorates his cheek bone. Suga’s grandmother had grown deaf when his mother was in her twenties, and together they had taken up sign language, which she then passed on to her son. For all of his life, she taught Chinese at a different middle school than the one he attended, and everyone she met loved her instantly.

A year ago, she died of cancer.

Every since then, Suga’s father, once a charismatic and kind man like his wife, had been growing increasingly angry and hateful toward his son. Suga gets quiet and distant whenever he talks too much about it, so the boy doesn’t know much more than that.

Despite their awkward first encounter, which involved a rather blatant display, Suga has yet to ask him about his wings. He’s acknowledged them only once, when the boy was having a bad day and Suga found him up on the roof, wings covering his head and face when Suga tried to get close. He’d said, “Put those down so I can see you, hmm? Tell me what’s wrong.” Other than that, he acts as if they are exactly the same. It’s something no one has ever done.

If he’s being honest, he adores Suga. The older boy (he  _ is  _ a year older, two years, until October, since his birthday was in June) is nothing but patient and happy, despite being homeless at fifteen years old and spending all his time hanging out with a scrawny mute genetics experiment.

Everyone Suga talks to adores him, just like his mother, and even with the boy’s wings out on display he doesn’t get as many looks of disgust and resentment. As if he is automatically a better person, just by standing next to the boy with silver hair and a smile that makes anyone feel better. He certainly feels like a better person around Suga.

Like him, Suga mostly wanders the area during the day and sleeps in shelters at night. They don’t spend every single day together, but most days neither of them has anything better to do than sit up on the roof, or in a park, or some days Suga will buy them ice cream.

Sugawara Koushi is the second truly beautiful thing he finds in this world.

 

 **August 2012**  
**13 years old**

He steals an apple from an open air market.

The market is packed with people, humid and tight, and it’s no trouble at all to pretend to rummage in his bag, hold it in a way that it perfectly receives the apple that falls when he “accidentally” walks into a leg of the stand.

He nearly gets away with it. The stall owner eyes him in annoyance before looking away, apparently deciding he’s not worth the time.

_ He nearly gets away with it,  _ before he has the gall,  _ the audacity _ to decide that he actually wants a  _ different  _ one, and mistakenly takes from the bottom, making a whole pile of them collapse.

The vendor screams and threatens to chop off his hand for a good five minutes until Suga shows up, all clear smiles and calm excuses as he shoos them both away.

He keeps both apples, but Suga makes him give him one for his trouble.

 

 **October 2012**  
**14 years old**

This time Suga is the one signing  _ Happy Birthday _ over and over again with a wide smile on his face that even pulls a small one onto his own.

 

 **December 2012**  
**14 years old**

He’s never really enjoyed Christmas before. It just made him sad, seeing all the families walking around, friends smiling and laughing, complete strangers smiling at each other and wishing each other happy holidays. He used to hope that people would be nicer to him too, but even if they couldn’t see the wings that very clearly marked him as  _ wrong _ , he was too dirty and obviously homeless for them to show him much kindness.

It seems to bring Suga down a bit too, and he simply explains with a (somewhat sad) smile that it was his mom’s favorite holiday before she died. The younger boy hugs him for as long as he dares and vows that he’ll actually buy a gift this year, for Suga.

 

 **December 2012**  
**14 years old**

(He spends more money than he has ((making a big show of counting out all his change out on the counter still works sometimes)) on a sapphire scarf for Suga. He loves it.)

(Suga spends practically all his own money on a knitted maroon hat with cat ears, because apparently in China red symbolizes good luck and wards off evil. The boy swears he’ll never get rid of it.)

 

 **February 2013**  
**14 years old**

Outside, snow and ice coat the streets and sidewalks, tripping up anyone who dares to fight the biting wind.

Inside, the quiet hum of space heaters fills the large room, the warm air circulated by the fans up on the ceiling.

Suga lets the smaller boy sit between his legs as he leans over his shoulder, watching as he roughly sketches the deaf girl with the beauty mark, sitting on the futon across from them with a book. His wings are wrapped around his arms as he tries to keep them out of the way.

“You’re a very good drawer,” Suga says softly. The boy can feel him shivering against his back.

 

 **April 2013**  
**14 years old**

The cherry blossoms are in bloom. With small fingers that still haven’t quite lost their childhood shake, he spends an entire day weaving them together into a crown, then presents it to Suga in the early evening. Suga laughs in delight, places it on his head and hugs the smaller boy, still laughing.

Suga spends the next day placing the small blossoms between the boy’s feathers and weaving a collar for the pretty cat that has kept them company all day, telling him about how he used to be a gymnast when he was still in school.

 

 **July 2013**  
**14 years old**

Suga tells him he’s going to buy them a slice of apple pie from the convenience store down the street, since it’s been a year since they met. “People who are married have anniversaries, I don’t see why friends can’t have them too,” he reasons. “I don’t think friendship love is any less valid than romantic love.”

The winged boy doesn’t see any flaws in this logic, and he likes the idea of doing something married people do with Suga, so he agrees. And of course, he’ll never turn down apple pie.

It takes eighteen minutes to get the store and come back to the shelter, on average, usually give or take four minutes. (He might habitually track numbers, so what.)

At the forty minute mark, he’s getting scared.

 

 **August 2013**  
**14 years old**

Suga never comes back.

This ache in the cavity of his chest must be what missing someone feels like, he supposes.

 

 **September 2013**  
**14 years old**

He’s absolutely starving.

Three days have passed since he’s eaten anything more substantial than water from a park fountain and half a bagel that a man threw in a trash can, still wrapped so it wasn’t touching anything else. He probably would have eaten it anyway.

Reckless and delirious with hunger, he walks right into a little corner store in the middle of the day, wearing a threadbare, overlarge hoodie that hides most of his wings and would never keep him warm.

But that’s okay. That’s not why he has it.

Glancing around for employees and paying no mind to cameras, he reaches a shelf stocked with snacks and just starts grabbing them, shoving them in his pockets. It’s pathetically obvious, he’s hardly trying to keep quiet but he’s dizzy with hunger and there’s a hollow pain at the bottom of his ribs whenever he breathes.

“Hey!”

He crams another packet of cookies into his pocket, turns on his heel, and walks further into the store with a half a mind to try to look nonchalant.

“Hey, get back here!”

He leans forward, pretends to peer at the drinks in the fridge despite his hands growing sweaty in his pockets. Did it suddenly get warmer?

_ “Hey!” _ A hand clamps down on his shoulder, yanking him around to stare into the eyes of a very angry clerk. “The hell do you think you’re doin’?” the guy demands, reaching for the boy. He flinches away automatically, doesn’t feel better when the man shoves his hands into his pockets and rips out handfuls of food.

“Thinkin’ you can steal from my store  _ boy?” _ he spits, “I don’t think so.” He releases his shoulder just to grab his arm, dragging him forcefully up to the front of the store.

He’s too dizzy to try running.

Instead, he stands in place, hands shaking as he watches the clerk snatch the phone off its base and dial a number. “I’m reportin’ a thief,” he bites into the phone, and the boy realizes with a drop of his empty stomach that the man is talking to the police. His vision swims as the clerk relays their location, and he misses half of the lecture he receives afterward.

When the police arrive – just once cruiser, the lights aren’t even flashing – the clerk pushes him forward. He sways but doesn’t fall, as he’s transferred from one adult to another, harsh words exchanged over his head. His sweatshirt falls off one shoulder, exposing his wings. At the sight of them, the clerk grows significantly angrier, the police officer grows minutely gentler.

The back of the police cruiser is clean, smells like the pumpkin shaped air freshener that dangles from the rearview mirror, even though Halloween isn’t for another month. He runs his fingers over the upholstery of the seat, clenches his abs to try to muffle the growling of his stomach. He doesn’t notice the police officer and her partner sending him worried looks in the mirrors.

He sits in the police station for a long time.

He’s lead in by the two officers who drove him here, deposited in a holding cell, and essentially forgotten about.

A few officers slide pieces of their lunch through the bars for him, no doubt concerned by the gauntness of his cheeks, the hollowness of his eyes, the sharpness of his collarbones. He can’t tell if his wings are helping or hurting his situation, so he leaves only one of them exposed with the sweatshirt still hanging off his shoulder.

He gets a ham and cheese sandwich, an orange, the rest of a seafood bento. He scarfs all of it down so fast he barely tastes it.

After the food as settled in his stomach and the pain in his ribs has gone away, he takes the chance to look around the police station.

The place seems busy, but not overwhelmingly so. Many officers are sitting behind large computers, doing paperwork, but there are just as many bustling around, talking in hurried voices, he can see what looks like a Very Serious meeting in another room.

There’s a wanted board, fairly close to him. He skims it.

His eyes stop cold when they land on a familiar face.

Her wild blonde hair is dirty, choppy and short at only chin length. Once sharp, focused jade eyes are cold, calculating, full of hatred and a touch of manic desperation. She has a black eye and a split lip, but she’s snarling at the camera nonetheless, ready to kill. She looks so different, he isn’t even sure if it’s her. But he glances to the paper tacked up beside the picture with information on it.

Name: _Enomoto Micaela_  
Age: _22 years old_  
Height: _172.7cm_  
Weight: _59kg_  
Wanted for: _Theft, breaking and entering, assault/battery, resisting arrest_  
Priority: _Medium_

He feels his heart nearly stop. It’s her.

The girl who rescued him from the lab, did her best to raise him while still taking care of herself. She was shitty at it, but he could tell she was trying for at least a little bit. He hasn’t thought about her in years, hasn’t seen her since he ran away nearly five years ago.

There was… someone else. They hadn’t been alone when they ran from the lab. There was the boy, her friend, her brother? He was never sure of their relationship. His name was… Jake… John… Jack. His name was Jack.

He skims the rest of the board, but no one matches.

 

 **October 2013 *****  
**15 years old**

Every shelter in the area is full. He’d sleep outside somewhere like he’s been doing, but it’s supposed to be near freezing tonight and the  _ last _ thing he needs is to get sick.

(He suspects that not every shelter he tried was full, but as nice as some of the staff are he knows that they’re a little freaked out by his wings, and some of them had glanced at them a telling number of times before turning him away.)

There’s one last shelter he can try.

It’s the one he always tries to avoid, because it’s the worst one with the laxest rules and uncaring staff. So he’ll definitely be let in, but so will practically anyone else. There’s no section for minors, he’ll be stuffed between two people he doesn’t know or trust, and he’ll be lucky to get out of there without being beaten up or violated or robbed.

(Too bad he's never been lucky a day in his life.)

He makes a mistake, fucks up, and in hindsight it's so  _ painfully  _ obvious that of  _ course  _ he shouldn't have gotten up in the middle of the night. Of  _ course  _ he shouldn't have been alone in the bathroom.  _ Of course not, is he fucking stupid? _

Apparently so.

Two men come in while he's washing his hands, one stations himself in front of the door and doesn't move, the other advances on him slowly. He backs away from the sink, obviously fearful of the man leering at him, but there’s only so much space for him to get away. He knows pretty quickly how this is going to end.

 

 **October 2013 *****  
**15 years old**

(Nobody hears him, nobody comes in, he spends an hour that night with a stranger’s hands all over his body and sick praise swimming through his head. This time leaves no physical marks, just a puddle of vomit and a permanent memory.)

 

 **December 2013**  
**15 years old**

His cat hat is dirty and parts of it are stretched, but he clutches it between his fingers and thinks about Sugawara Koushi and his smile.

 

 **March 2014**  
**15 years old**

The cherry blossoms are in bloom early this year, filling the streets and his hair with sakura petals.

They’ve never made him so  _ angry  _ before.

 

 **July 2014**  
**15 years old**

He sits under the bonsai tree on the roof, right where he sat just over two years ago. It’s not as blisteringly hot as he thinks it was back then, but the sun is still beating down on him uncomfortably. A different cat purrs nearby. He ruffles his wings and stretches them out, points the tips toward the sky and thinks about how if he could, he would fly to the stars.

 

 **January 2015**  
**16 years old**

There have always been plenty of teenagers in the shelters he says at. He has no idea where the hell they all come from, why Japan has all these homeless kids, but he is just glad that he’s finally looked at as an adult and not a small child anymore. Sure, he’s still short and slight and could be mistaken for a child at a glance, but there is an oldness to his face now, a sharpness in his jaw and the ever subtle broadening of shoulders.

He is no longer a defenseless little boy.

With this age, he realizes, comes responsibility. He finds himself sharing some of his food with the younger kids, dirt smeared children who look at the bag of chips he hands them like it’s a seven-course meal from Paris.

It’s goddamn freezing tonight, but he isn’t bothered. He’s got two sweatshirts on; his own, and one that Suga left behind when he  _ disappeared _ a year and a half ago and  _ left him _ –

He’s over it.

But he’s feeling pretty warm, sitting against the wall on his futon and reading a book, wings settled comfortably at his sides under the sweatshirts.

He glances up when he sees someone sit down on the futon next to him, a tiny girl with pigtails and tear tracks on her dirty face. She’s wearing old jeans and just a t-shirt, hugging her arms as she curls in on herself. The blanket she pulls out of her backpack was probably beautiful once, deep green and woven in intricate patterns, but now it’s threadbare and full of holes. It’ll never keep her warm.

Slowly, he puts down his book and unzips his top sweatshirt, slipping it carefully off his shoulders. The girl doesn’t look up until he leans forward and holds it out to her, the weight of the heavy material dragging his arm down and making it bob.

He raises his eyebrows at her a bit when she doesn’t react, hopes his face looks open and inviting like an imitation of Suga. He doesn’t know how well it works, but the girl reaches forward and snatches the sweatshirt away, hugging it to her chest for a moment before hastily pulling it on.

“Thank you,” she chirps when she’s nestled into the fabric happily, only her head barely poking out the top.

He bows his head with a small smile, then returns to his book.

 

 **March 2015**  
**16 years old**

He wanders into a part of the prefecture he’s never really been in.

It’s dark out by now, but he doesn’t really want to go to a shelter. Maybe he’ll sleep outside, like he used to when he was young and too terrified to check into a shelter, or if they were all full. It’s still cold at night, but he’ll survive.

The area he’s in is kind of… well… shittier than what he’s used to. It’s not really rundown, but the buildings have this kind of rustic and overgrown look to them, like they’ve been here for so long that the plants have begun to reclaim them.

He realizes after a few more minutes of walking that he’s in what Suga used to tentatively call the Red Light District, with only somewhat sketchy restaurants, theaters, clubs, and shops with mostly open fronts.

As a child, he was scared away by the scantily dressed women on the corners, the loud adults stumbling around after a few too many drinks, the burly, tattooed men who lurked in the shadows, distributed packets of snowy powder and olive moss and light, clear crystals.

As a young teenager, he was scared away by Suga’s warnings, his disheartening explanations of what he’d seen here as a child. It also gave him a word to call what he’d done for money before he met Suga.

But it doesn’t seem too bad now. It rained all day, more of a dull mist really, so the shiny black pavement reflects flickering neon signs, the light bouncing off the ground and umbrellas of pedestrians. Dozens of wires and signs hang above him, casting weird shadows combined with the light spilling from the buildings.

The dull thudding of music from some of the clubs provides a steady foundation for the quiet chatter surrounding him, stifled laughter and muted conversations. Bikes are parked up and down the street, evenly interspersed between the large plants that seem to grow from nowhere, as much a part of the buildings as their steel frames are. Cats wind in out of the buildings, meowing, begging for food, occasionally getting petted.

Enchanted, he slows down slightly as he walks beneath a row of carmine lanterns, admiring the peach and honey glow they cast on the faces of two girls leaning against their bikes, chatting and laughing over containers of takeout. One of them looks up when she feels him staring, waves her fingers before going back to giggling with her friend. He smiles softly for a moment before moving on, drifting on down the street.

 

 **May 2015**  
**16 years old**

Back in the Red Light District, this time at two in the afternoon when it’s warm and bright and bustling with life, he thinks he sees Suga. He’s sitting beside a boy with black hair and western eyes, on the front steps of what looks to be a club, smiling behind his hand.

He turns around and sprints the entire way back to the shelter.

 

 **June 2015 *****  
**16 years old**

For years he’s known why those women stand on the corners, leaning against walls in their unbelievably short skirts and high heels and tight tops, trying to expose as much skin as possible. He understands their smudged makeup, ripped stockings, up done hair. Their bruised thighs and tired eyes and despondent voices.

He understands.

He stands among them.

The boy leans against a stop sign at a four-way intersection beneath soft carnation lights, chin tipped up, eyes half lidded. His overlarge shirt is tied up to reveal his pale, flat stomach, jeans stolen from a girl that hug all the curves his legs barely have. His wings are an attraction here, exotic, sexy. He keeps them behind him, but loose, carefully on display.

With his thumb, he flicks the end of the stolen cigarette held loftily between his fingers, lit with a stolen lighter, the rest of the stolen pack sitting in the back pocket of his jeans. Ever so casually he puffs on it, the chemicals numbing him, the smoke shrouding him, the action making him feel kind of sick.

A man pulls up in front of him in a sleek black car. He wonders if the odd shape of it is distorting his body in the reflection, or if he’s really that garishly skinny. The window rolls down, and the man looks at him expectantly.

The boy doesn’t rush, tips his head back and blows out the smoke before stubbing the cigarette out on the stop sign. He approaches the car slowly, crossing his legs when he walks, bending at the waist to peer inside.

“How much?” the man asks. His voice is gruff, and the inside of the car smells like cigarettes as well.

The boy shrugs, trying to appear indifferent. It’s not hard.

“Twenty thousand yen,” the man proposes. “For everything.”

He nods, waits for the man to reach over and unlock the passenger door before he slides in.

In an alleyway between two bars, the boy lies on his back in the backseat, shaking, panting, grinding his hips up because that’s what he’s supposed to do. If nothing else, he’s good for sex.

 

 **June 2016**  
**16 years old**

Twenty thousand yen buys him new sneakers – cherry Converse – a hot bowl of ramen every night for a week, a pair of shorts, five t-shirts, a decent haircut from another homeless boy, and he keeps the last four thousand or so to spend when he needs it.

Twenty thousand yen loses him a piece of his heart.

 

 **August 2016**  
**16 years old**

He loves these late summer evenings. When the day is winding down and the clubs are just beginning to open, their signs flickering to life and providing a low buzz underneath the chatter of pedestrians. The setting sun turns the sky brilliant shades of amber and peach as a warm breeze tickles along his face and between his feathers.

There’s also that: People in this area don’t seem to care about his wings.

He's been stared at, pointed at, yes, the subject of whispers behind hands, even caused a guy to crash his bike because he was staring (it was hilarious). But no one treats him differently because of them. A waitress comes over when he sits down in diners, shop clerks don't treat him with disdain or disgust or try to rob him of his change. He's allowed to sit on the front steps of those open fronted stores, and just watch the world move past him.

He’s doing that now. Pressed into the wall slightly to the side of the doorway, so he’s not in the way of people coming and going, he’s bent forward so his bare chest is pressed against his knees. His wings are held out loosely behind him, crossed like an X in their more or less neutral position.

The store behind him sells mostly flowers, along with a small section for potting soil and gardening supplies. A pleasant, earthy smell hangs in the air around him. The shop has been practically overrun by the plants it grows and has on display, and they spill out onto the street even brighter and more abundant than they do everywhere else in the neighborhood.

The shop owner’s daughter, a short blond girl with sparkling eyes, is a meter or so behind him, tending to the camellias as she hums under her breath. Warm air, not too humid, ruffles his hair and feathers and cools his skin.

(This is the third beautiful thing he finds in this world.)

 

 **October 2015**  
**17 years old**

He’s (kind of) having a conversation with the flower shop owner’s daughter. She’s sitting behind the counter, a tangerine scarf wrapped around her neck, waving her hands and telling him about her friend’s birthday party she went to last night. She’s several years older than him, attending a college nearby. When she stops talking so he can write a response on the notepad sitting on the counter between them, she pulls the scarf up over her mouth and nose. She still smiles with her eyes.

_ It’s my birthday today _ , he writes.  _ I’m 17. _

She squeals a quick “Happy birthday!” as she jumps off the stool, rushing around the counter and for a horrifying moment the boy thinks he’s going to be hugged. But she hurries past him, flitting around the shop and inspecting the flowers. The small ponytail on the side of her head bobs as she sifts through the plants.

After a short hunt, she returns with a large ivory flower in her hand. “This is a Casablanca flower,” she explains as she holds it out to him, “It means celebration! Happy birthday, darling.”

He takes the flower from her and twirls it in his fingers, inhaling the tender scent. He spends the rest of the afternoon sketching the flower on the notepad while she talks, the ink the same orange as her scarf.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> red light district is somewhere where there's like sex work going on, generally just the bad part of town
> 
> It also gave him a word to call what he’d done for money before he met Suga.  
> (prostitution)


	4. Fucked Up On Life

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> anyway i edited and edited and edited this chapter but i still fuckin hate it it's boring and weird cuz the last two chapters cover years and years of his life but this one is. two days. and just overall i feel like it's poorly written and slow and AH
> 
>  
> 
> also i made like almost everyone in this biracial bc i CAN so here's a lesson in korean honorifics bc. that's relevant. (i am not korean, i don't speak korean, i did a lot of research):
> 
> -ya (or -a if the name ends in a consonant) is mostly used for kids or very close friends (very close to the japanese -chan)
> 
> -ssi is the most common, it's (more or less) japanese equivalent is -kun. it's added to the full name, the first name if the person is familiar, adding it to the last name is considered rude/condescending
> 
> -nim is for anyone of higher standing than the speaker, but is dropped for close friends and family (japanese -san)
> 
> seonsaeng is the highest, used for parents/teachers. (japanese would be like -sensei)
> 
> appa is father  
> eomma is mother

**December 2015 – Month one**

 

He doesn’t really have anything _against_ rain. That isn’t it at all.

He’s just not a huge fan of getting _caught_ in it. Especially not in _December._

And _especially_ when he gave his umbrella to a pair of boys – no older than ten – who were sitting huddled in an alleyway between two bars. Speaking from experience, that is no place for children. Certainly not when it’s pouring rain, and he couldn’t bring himself to leave them alone like that. (But he couldn’t stay with them either, really, so he gave them what he could and was on his way.)

Rain always lends a sort of ethereal beauty to the flower shop. The heaviness in the air brings out the smell of the flowers and the dirt, and he felt as though he was in a forest rather than this cramped part of the city. The drops pelting the pavement outside provided a nice background thrum, and brought a wash of warm air. He had settled at the counter with the girl and sketched some of the plants while she worked.

But then evening rolled in, and with it even heavier rain, forcing them to close for the night. So now he’s walking, not really sure where he’s going because a shelter sounds _really_ unappealing right now, and he can’t exactly sleep outside at this time of year, with this kind of weather.

Neon store lights reflect off the wet pavement, distorted as he splashes through their puddles. With an immune system like his, he doesn’t give a shit if his feet get soaked anymore. He won’t get sick, and the rain begins to let up as he goes, turning into more of a mist than a torrential downpour. He keeps his hood up anyway.

The pounding of bass gets closer and closer as he approaches one of the clubs, something vaguely poppy but kind of slow becoming audible as he draws near. The flickering sign reads 雄猫 – Tomukyatto no. Tomcat. A red awning keeps the short line of people dry as they wait to be checked in by the bouncer.

The bouncer is rather intimidating, with his shaved head and the long scar that runs from his cheek to his jaw to his neck. There are red tunnels in his ears, a large ring in the septum of his nose. Muscles bulge under his t-shirt, promising consequences if anyone steps out of line. The boy shudders, his steps faltering.

Another man stands off to the side. He leans against the brick wall with a cigarette between his lips, pushing his bleached blond back and holding it in place with a headband. When their eyes meet, the other man’s widen.

The boy subconsciously tenses, prepared to run, but the man lifts one side of his mouth in a smile that’s overly casual but still friendly. _I won’t hurt you,_ he seems to say with the lift of one eyebrow, _Come over here._

Shadows collect in quiet corners. He’s not as scary as the bouncer, so the boy crosses the street.

“Hey there,” the man says, “Where you headed?”

 _Nowhere,_ he doesn’t know how to reply.

“What’s the matter? Cat got your tongue?” The man laughs a little bit at his own joke, probably meant to be a reference to the name of the club, then holds out his hand to shake. “Name’s Ukai Keishin. I own this place.”

He nods a little bit in acknowledgment, thinks his own family name in response.

“You look a little run down. Living on the streets?”

Is it that obvious?

(Yeah, he guesses it kind of is.)

He nods again.

“Thought so,” Ukai hums. “We got a few boys off the streets, most of ‘em got big plans now.”

 _Okay…_ He doesn’t really understand why he’s here, why this man is talking to him. The awning keeps him dry at least, but he’d like to get going and find somewhere to sleep.

“Tell you what.” Ukai flicks his cigarette and starts again. “You want a job? I think you could make both of us a lot of money.”

His mouth falls open a little bit in shock, would let loose a noise of surprise if he could manage it. Does he want to _work here?_ As what, a bartender? A stripper? The idea isn’t all that off putting, any job is a step up from where he is now. And Ukai seems like an all right guy, not like someone looking to manipulate him into prostitution or something.

(Not that prostitution is something he’s unfamiliar with.)

He nods again.

 

Inside the club it’s wonderfully warm, and he has to admit the place is nice, even if in a different way than the flower shop or the cherry trees or Suga’s smile.

The theme is red and black, he notices right away, just a hint of a gold accent. To the left is a long bar, manned by a tall boy with midnight blue hair and bangs hanging straight over his face. He bustles back and forth, looks up to bow his head at Ukai for a moment before getting back to work.

Directly in front of him is a sunken dance floor, covered in people dancing and grinding. Colors flash beneath them, painting the dancers pink and gold, until he imagines they’re from another planet altogether.

Booths line the right wall, at the same level as the bar with a wide enough walkway for people to get to and from them without falling into the dance floor.

The back left corner is taken up by a stage, one that kind of looks like it belongs in a fashion show and not a strip club. It’s wide in the back, with poles on either side and a long walkway extending from the middle with a third pole at the very end.

Tables line either side of the walkway, packed with people all craning to get a good look at the tall boy with chestnut hair gracefully twirling around a pole, dressed in silk clothes so translucent they’re barely there at all. A bouncer with spiky black hair is positioned off to the side, arms crossed and glowering at the crowd. (Like everyone else, his eyes magnetize back to the boy on the pole every few seconds.)

There’s a second floor as well, a loft with more tables and dimmer lighting, overlooking the first floor. He can’t tell how far back it goes, but a waiter or two moves around, handing out drinks and taking orders. A wall hides the rest of the first floor, most likely dressing rooms, offices, whatever.

Ukai leads him to the right, between the dance floor and the booths, and through a glossy, cherry red door in the black wall marked Employees Only. The hallway they find themselves in looks like that out of any building: Industrial tile, industrial lighting, off-white paint. To the left, where the stage is on the other side of the wall, he can see that the hallway opens up to a large room, full of lockers and the hiss of showers.

A few unmarked doors line the long hall at the end by the dressing room, but the closer ones have names on them, printed and slid into cases on the wood. As the boy takes the time to read, Ukai produces a set of keys, hunting through them for the one to the door in front of him marked Owner’s Office.

 _Nishinoya Yuu_ , the farthest door reads, with half of it scribbled over in orange pen to leave only _Noya Yuu_.

The next one says _Yamaguchi Tadashi_ with _freckle-ya_ written under it in cyan ink.

 _Oikawa Tooru_ followed by a little alien head in the same light pen as ‘freckle-ya.’ Under it the date _January 1st!!_

Ukai catches him looking as he looks up to beckon him in. “Like I said, we got street kids. They can’t afford another place yet, so we let ‘em stay here.” He glances toward the one with the date under it. “Oikawa’s moving out at the start of the new year. Moving in with his boyfriend, one of the bouncers.”

He nods in understanding, following Ukai into his office. “Another dancer is saving up for an apartment with my nephew,” he continues, “Should be another few months or so. Have a seat,” he switches, gesturing to one of the chairs across from the desk. The boy sits. “So, if you want this job I ain’t gonna turn you away, since I’m the one who offered, but it’s still nice to have an interview, don’t you think?”

The boy shrugs. He’s never had a job interview before, he’s never had any sort of interview. Nervously twisting his fingers and shuffling his wings, he reminds himself that this isn’t a test. The motion catches Ukai’s eye.

“You come from the lab,” he murmurs, “Don’t you?”

The boy closes his eyes, head lowering under the weight of his childhood. They sit in silence as the information sinks in, before Ukai speaks up again, softer now.

“How ‘bout we just get to know each other?” He waits for the boy to nod before continuing. “What’s your name, then?”

He makes a motion like writing, tilting his head to indicate the question.

“You want – Pen and paper? Hold on.” He rummages around in his desk for a moment before coming up with a pad of salmon sticky notes and a black pen. He slides them across the desk, waiting patiently as he deliberates what to write.

 _Kozume,_ is finally what he hands back.

“No given name?”

He shakes his head.

“All right,” Ukai shrugs, unperturbed, “I’m sure the boys will give you one sooner or later. Some of them are ah, very fond of nicknames.” He clears his throat and leans back in his chair. “How old are you, Kozume?”

It’s the first time he’s heard his name said out loud since he was a child, back in the lab, when Yamatsu told him about it. He hates it instantly. The sooner the other boys give him a name, the better.

He must have a physical reaction when hear hears it, because Ukai asks, “You don’t like your name?”

 _Never heard it before,_ he writes back.

“I’m sure they’ll find something to call you soon enough, but back to my question?” Ukai directs gently.

 _Oh. 16,_ he writes, then has to think about it. He knows his birthday was a few months ago, knows he told the girl at the flower shop how old he was… He scratches it out and corrects himself. _I’m 17._

Ukai narrows his eyes slightly like he’s trying to tell if he’s being lied to, then it’s gone in an instant. “We’ve had younger boys,” he says, mostly to himself, then to the boy, “You got a place to stay, or do you need one of our rooms? Free of charge.”

He hardly hesitates, hardly thinks about anything other than the heating vent in the corner or the hiss of the showers down the hall.

 _I’d like to stay here, please_.

They go on to discuss the pay and the details of his job description. He doesn’t know how to dance, obviously, but Ukai promises that nineteen-year-old Oikawa is their best dancer and he’ll teach him. He listens for a while as Ukai tells him about a few of the staff, and the floor manager, Takeda.

He learns about the shifts, rules, and even a little about Ukai himself. Finally, he asks if he would like to go meet the rest of the staff. Most of them work every day except Monday and Tuesday, eight pm to three am, with about two hours leeway at the beginning and end of the night depending on how busy it is. He agrees.

Ukai leads him back out to the hallway, then down to the large room at the end, off the stage. The floor is sunken, like the dance floor out front, with a few steps leading down.

 _It smells nice,_ is the first thing he thinks when he walks in.

(It only smells like body wash and cheap rainforest shampoo, but he’s been living on the streets since he was nine years old.)

The showers are to the right, a line of about five of them with curtains that go to nearly twice his height. Only one of them is currently in use, faint humming heard over the water.

Directly across from him is a row of lockers with benches. A few guys sit on them in various states of undress, chatting and laughing. To the left, stairs lead back up to a curtain he assumes leads to the stage, with racks of costumes and a few wide vanity tables in a line covered in makeup and hairspray, glitter and body oil.

Everyone turns around when they enter, bowing briefly to Ukai before they notice the boy with wings half hiding behind him.

“Evening, boys,” Ukai says, “Slacking off, I see.”

“Hey, we’re on break!” a boy with fiery orange hair squawks. He sees the winged boy and tilts his head to peer around his boss. “Hey, who’s that? He looks cool!”

Ukai puts a hand on his shoulder, leading him around to stand beside him. “This is our newest employee,” he announces, “He’ll be starting when we open again on Wednesday, just as a waiter for now. Until then; Where is Oikawa?”

“Out bothering Iwaizumi-san, I would imagine,” a tall boy with blond hair and glasses sighs.

“Hm. When he gets back, someone tell him to see me in my office.” There’s a quiet chorus of _Ooooh,_ but Ukai ignores it. “Come introduce yourselves, then.”

The boy with orange hair who’d spoken up first bounces over. His hair is shaved in the back, he sees when he gets closer, and he can’t be any older than the boy himself. “Hi!” he exclaims. There’s a small silver ring through the side of his nose, glinting. “I’m Hinata Shouyou! I like your wings, they’re so like, GWAH!!”

The boy takes half a step back to give himself room to breathe, but smiles a little bit, lifting his right hand to touch his fingers to his chin before moving it down in an arc so his palm is facing the ceiling and his fingers are pointing at Hinata. _Thank you._

The next boy is even shorter than Hinata, though he appears to be a bit older, with spiky black hair and a single small blond piece that hangs over his forehead. He’s completely naked except for a pair of boxers, but he stands confidently and points to his chest with his thumb.

“Me llamo Noya!” _My name is Noya!_ he announces. The first two words are lost on him, but he takes this as the boy with the partially scribbled out name. Rings pierce all the way up the sides of both ears, and there’s a small hook in one eyebrow. “They call me el Dios!” _The Deity!_ His speech is accented, not like anything he’s ever heard.

He tries to return the enthusiasm, lifting one hand to wave and smiling wider. He’s very interested in whatever language Noya’s words were in, and in that one piece of blond hair, likes the contrast of it against the black.

A beautiful boy with black hair and quiet, knowing eyes introduces himself as Akaashi, the tall blond boy with glasses is Tsukishima, the boy with forest green hair and freckles is his friend Yamaguchi… He meets Daichi and Lev and Kageyama the bartender until he’s struggling to keep everyone’s names straight. Ukai notices how overwhelmed he is and leads him away to get a room set up for him.

In the end it’s nothing fancy, just a room between Noya’s and the last unoccupied one, with a bed and a small dresser and a single window with no curtains. The window looks out at about a five-foot alleyway and the brick of the building next door; he can feel the draft coming from it, but it’s a window nonetheless. Two light switches sit on the wall next to the door; the first one doesn’t do anything when he flicks it, but the second lights up the ceiling.

A small warmth erupts in his chest, and a smile tugs its way onto his face.

He’ll live here.

 

(The problem, with him living and working here, is that he has no legal papers. None. Not a birth certificate, not a death certificate. He’s completely undocumented.

But this is underground Sendai, where legalities can be bought and sold with money and status. And Ukai Keishin has plenty of both. With a birthday and a family name, Ukai gets his hands on every legal paper the boy could need, a promise to complete them as soon as the other boys find him a given name.)

 

When he wakes up the next morning, he is blissfully alone. Quiet music drifts from beyond the hallway, softer than what he heard last night. It’s nice, as is the light coming in his window. Reflecting off the brick wall across from him mutes it a good deal, and it bathes his room in buttermilk hues.

He gets up slowly, taking his time stretching his wings and cracking his back until he feels more awake. Ukai told him last night to shower whenever he felt like it – there should be soap in each of the stalls – so he grabs a more or less clean shirt out of his backpack and his only other pair of jeans, cracking open the door to peer into the hall.

Oikawa’s door is shut, but talking and laughter spills from Noya’s open one. He tiptoes out of his room, down the hall to the right and into the open locker room. It's empty, much to his relief, and he spends what feels like an eternity soaking in the hot water, stretching and flapping his wings until he's gotten the entire stall completely soaked.

He's finishing pushing his wings through the slits in his shirt when footsteps echo down the hallway. One set is light and erratic, jumping, shoes tapping. The other is more steady… barefoot? A moment later the boy with bright orange hair, Hinata, bounds in, followed by a familiar boy with emerald hair whose name escapes him.

Hinata grinds to a halt when he notices him sitting on the bench, one wing curled self-consciously around his body, the other frozen in the air behind him from being pushed through his shirt, hands still clenched at the hem to keep it down around his waist.

“Hi!” Hinata chirps after the second, “Wow! You look even better when you're all clean!” He bounds over as he sheds his coat, dropping it on the bench beside the boy.

Still nervous, the compliment brings only a small smile as he finishes putting his shirt on, hesitantly signing _Thank you_ again when he’s done.

“Hey what’s that mean? You did it last night,” Hinata asks, sitting on his coat on the bench.

The boy with green hair doesn't follow, but instead goes over to the line of vanity tables and begins clearing one of them off. “Sign language, Hinata-kun,” he says without turning toward them, still shuffling things around to clear space. His Japanese is choppy, accented. Several towels drape over his arm, and once the table is mostly empty he begins laying them on the bench and around his neck.

The winged boy’s eyebrows draw inward as he's watching, until Hinata turns around to see what he's staring at. “Oh! We’re gonna dye Yamaguchi-kun’s hair again!” he explains, bouncing back to his feet. “His roots are starting to show and the color’s washing out. You wanna watch?”

He nods, standing and following Hinata over to the table. The boy watches as he picks up a box, pulling it open and taking out a bottle, a small container, and a packet of snowy powder.

 _Looks like drugs,_ he thinks.

Hinata dumps the powder into the container, along with some white goop fight the bottle, then shakes out a little black brush. He sets about mixing the bleach while Yamaguchi puts on music, tinny and… decidedly Chinese.

As Hinata mixes the bleach and applies it to Yamaguchi’s roots, he explains the entire process to the winged boy in great detail. He explains how the bleach works, how the dye works, and how to take care of hair after it's been dyed. He listens adamantly, enthralled.

During a lull in Hinata’s lecture, the boy points to the dye in his hands and then to Hinata’s bright orange hair, eyebrows furrowed to indicate his question.

“Do I dye my hair?” Hinata vocalizes for him. The boy nods and Hinata laughs. “Nope! All natural! Everyone in my family has hair like this.”

 _Family._ He thinks about that for a while, not for the first or last time, and wonders what it's like to have a mother and father and maybe even a brother or sister. He tilts his head at Hinata, wondering if he’ll understand the words he's trying to convey. There’s not a lot to go off of.

“What?” he asks, predictably confused. “Hold on, want a pen?”

“Probably he want understand how the hair happen _all natural,”_ Yamaguchi interjects. The winged boy smiles but shakes his head.

Hinata answers it anyway. “My grandma on my mom’s side came from Scotland. We were learning about genetics in school before I left and lemme tell you… The odds of the rest of us ending up with this hair are just… so low. So low.”

Yamaguchi nods, a small smile on his lips. The conversation seems to make sense to him, even if he struggles to vocalize his own thoughts.

“Hey anyway, you wanna know about my family?” Hinata tries again.

The boy nods eagerly, sitting up straighter.

“Okay! Well back home it's just my mom and my sister now. My sister’s six! Her name is Natsu and she's annoying sometimes, but I love her!”

“She cute,” Yamaguchi agrees. “Hinata-kun bringing her to work different days, Ukai-san let person not work and to watch her. Hey,” he frowns, “You put dye on ear.”

“Oh! Sorry!” Hinata snatches up the washcloth on the table and carefully wipes Yamaguchi's ear. “But yeah, my dad… he died a while back, and my mom kinda… I don't know.” Hinata’s face clouds as he talks. He finishes wiping away the dye and drops the cloth back on the table. “She got bad fast, I can't always leave Natsu at home. And I can't afford to take the day off, either.” He brightens as he picks up the brush again. “The guys like her though!”

He nods along, an image forming in his mind of a little girl with Hinata’s bright hair and wide smile. She’d probably shout and get excited over everything, just like her brother.

This imaginary girl dissipates, replaced with freckles and green hair half covered in tin foil, an accented voice asking him a question. “You have family?”

He shakes his head, studies Yamaguchi's face as he stares down his own reflection and murmurs, “Me too.”

“I think we’re done,” Hinata says as he wraps the last of Yamaguchi's hair in tin foil. He looks hilarious, but laughing isn't really one of the boy’s skills, so he covers his mouth as he huffs out air. Hinata takes a picture in the mirror of Yamaguchi’s huge peace signs and smile, laughing enough for all of them.

“Well, we know the aliens won't get you, Freckle-ya,” says a lilting voice from the doorway. The winged boy jerks around to stare at the newcomer. He's _tall,_ with chestnut hair that flips out at the ends and umber eyes that glitter with playfulness. He doesn’t _look_ Japanese. He’s the one he saw dancing last night.

When he notices the boy staring he flips up a peace sign and a gentle smile. “Annyeong~” _Hello,_ he greets happily in a language that is _also_ not Japanese. “I'm Oikawa Tooru, Tomcat’s best dancer.”

Hinata gives a small shout of protest and looks up from where he’s peeling off his gloves and throwing out empty containers. “Not for long!” he announces, gesturing aggressively with the gloves clutched in his fist. “I’m gonna be the best dancer in all of Japan!”

Oikawa saunters over, patting the shortest boy’s bright hair in a way that’s a touch more affectionate than it is condescending. “Okay, Chibi-ya,” he says, voice dripping sugar, “Try to graduate from waiter, first, hmm?” Hinata looks away with a pout as Oikawa’s eyes flit over to the winged boy, filling with shrewd curiosity. “You must be Kozume,” he says, voice clear of emotion.

The boy flinches again at the name, one eye twitching up in a spasming half wink.

“Ah. Appa mentioned you weren’t fond of that name.” His voice doesn’t change, though his eyes grow more slitted. The boy doesn’t know who he means by Appa, and he’s feeling more and more like this is a test that he’s failing, but suddenly Oikawa’s mask shatters and he’s all warm smiles and gentle kindness again.

“Never you mind,” he sings, “We’ll find something to call you.” He ruffles Hinata’s hair one more time before using his hold to push his head away, then steps gracefully up to the winged boy. “You’re starting as a waiter on Wednesday, yes?”

He nods, just a single bob of his head. Oikawa is… hard to predict.

“I’m supposed to teach you how to dance in the meantime, since we’ve got plenty of waiters.”

“We have…” Yamaguchi counts in his head for a moment, mumbling names and counting on his fingers. “...Five. Ah, four,” he corrects.

“This is a small establishment, Freckle-ya, we only _need_ four waiters.”

Yamaguchi lifts his eyebrows and pulls the corners of his mouth down in a face of reluctant agreement before moving to help Hinata finish cleaning up. “Just leave that on till we open tonight, then wash it out,” Hinata says. Yamaguchi nods.

“Come along, Ko-ya,” Oikawa says, “I’ll show you around.”

 

The club looks different in the daylight.

When it’s normally lit and practically empty, it looks a lot bigger, but a lot less daunting. Something indie and beat driven thrums over the speakers, and when he looks up at the DJ booth all he can see are feet, propped up on the window, and the profile of the blond boy with glasses, his phone plugged into the turntables.

“I can introduce you to some more of the staff, if you’d like,” Oikawa offers.

He shrugs a little bit before nodding.

“All right, you met Glasses-ssi last night, yes?” At his confused look, Oikawa gestures toward the DJ booth. “You’d know him as Tsukishima, probably.” The winged boy nods, the name coming back to him, though the confusion doesn’t leave him completely. He’s familiar with honorifics, of course, but the ones Oikawa uses are foreign to him.

Oikawa notices. “Oh, my honorifics, yes,” he laughs. “They’re Korean, little one. I was born in Daegu, South Korea, I moved here when I was… oh, eight years old? I don’t remember.” He waves a hand flippantly, but there’s a brief flash of something in his eyes that says he _does_ remember. “I learned Japanese quickly,” he leans down and whispers, “A little quicker than Freckle-ya,” a wink, and he’s back to normal, “But some things just stick, you know?”

The boy nods, though he doesn’t know.

Oikawa leads him toward the bar, where a man and the bartender from last night, a boy closer to his own age, bustle back and forth, lining up bottles on the counter. The boy pulls himself onto a stool as Oikawa does the same.

“I believe you’ve already met Tobio-ya,” he says, gesturing to the navy haired boy with the straight bangs.

Kageyama gives them both a small bow.

Oikawa gestures to the older man with strong looking arms and a face full of freckles. His eyes are intense, hair short and spiky. He’s too intimidating for the boy to look at for too long. “This is Iwa-chan!” Oikawa croons, the nickname completely at odds with the scowl now directed at him. “The best bouncer –” he shoots Kageyama a look that the younger boy ignores, “– and bartender in Japan! And my boyfriend.”

“I am in no way associated with him,” ‘Iwa-chan’ deadpans, scowl shifting to the young boy. He tries not flinch. “And my name is Iwaizumi Hajime. Don’t call me Iwa-chan.”

He wonders why Iwaizumi Hajime is the only one with a Japanese honorific, when he also doesn’t look fully Japanese himself.

“He won’t call you anything, you big bully, he doesn’t speak.”

It startles him a little, hearing it acknowledged like that. He _knows_ he doesn’t speak, obviously. He’s never said a word in his whole life, aside from crying and cooing as a baby, and the occasional breathy exclamation. But he doesn’t really think about it anymore; he spends most of his time alone, there isn’t anyone for him to talk to. Most people he meets just kind of immediately accept his silence and accommodate for it. Other people talk enough, he rarely feels the need to add to it.

He must look kind of scared, waiting for a reaction, because Iwaizumi’s face softens and he says, “That’s fine. Yamaguchi didn’t say anything when he first came here either.”

“Freckle-ya didn’t speak Japanese when he first came here,” Oikawa defends.

Iwaizumi shrugs, points over his shoulder with his thumb as he largely ignores Oikawa’s interruption. “Kageyama still doesn’t say much.” Kageyama glances up from where he appears to be taking stock of the shelves and looks impassively over at them, then carries on what he’s doing. “Do either of you want a drink?” Iwaizumi asks. “Something to eat, lunch?”

“Oooh, make me a sex on the beach, Iwa-chan.”

“A _non-alcoholic_ drink, Shittykawa, what the hell, it’s like four in the afternoon. And you can’t even drink.”

Oikawa pulls a face that says, _It’s way too late for that,_ then switches to a pout. “Iwa-chan is so mean to me,” he whines, but he props his chin up in his hand and thinks for a moment. “Fine then. Lemon balm tea, please.”

“Nothing to eat?”

“No thank you!” he sings.

Iwaizumi nods and turns to the other boy. He holds three fingers of his right hand up to the side of his mouth, the sign for water, and desperately hopes Iwaizumi understands. He doesn’t, the boy can tell by the look on his face, but he’s smart enough to get the idea. “Water?” he tries. He nods, and Iwaizumi nods back. “Anything to eat? We’re not supposed to open the kitchen until we open, but there’s always food in the back for staff.”

The boy shakes his head. He probably won’t be hungry for another few hours, and Iwaizumi walks away to get their drinks.

“The club doesn’t open until eight, but most of us hang out here during the day,” Oikawa explains as he stares after Iwaizumi. “Not everyone, obviously, because some people have lives –” he waves his hand, as if this is a ridiculous concept, “– but Freckle-ya, Noya, and I live here, so Glasses-ssi comes over usually to see Freckle-ya, and Baldy comes over to see Noya, Chibi-ya is here to dye Freckle-ya’s hair, and Tobio-ya is here for… some reason.” He raises his voice slightly then and says, “And Iwa-chan came to see me, right?”

“I came to teach Kageyama how to make rainbow shots,” Iwaizumi shouts back without missing a beat.

“So mean,” Oikawa grumbles as he turns back to the boy. “I believe you’ve met all the waiters, and about half of security… Oh! Baldy is here, we can meet him in a few minutes. That just leaves Owl-nim and two of the dancers.”

Ukai wasn’t kidding about the nicknames. Oikawa is relentless.

He sips at his water as Oikawa chatters on about some of his coworkers. He’s dating Iwaizumi and is moving into his college apartment with him at the end of the month, as he continuously reiterates, but after him his favorite employee is Hinata, dubbed Chibi-ya. Usually he’s just a waiter, but he dances sometimes and Oikawa admires his dedication and _incredible_ flexibility.

(“It’s unreal, Ko-ya, wait till you see him. Of course, he’s got nothing on me.”)

When Oikawa finishes his tea, he leads them back into the hallway between sections (“We call this the tunnel. The locker room is the pit.”) and stops in front of Noya’s open door. “Annyeong~” he sings, “Knock knock!”

Noya and another, much taller boy with a shaved head are lying with their backs on the ground, legs up with their calves and feet resting on the bed. The boy can’t tell if this boy with the shaved head is older, or if Noya’s height makes him look younger than everyone. When they walk in, Noya props his head up to look at them upside down, neck bent at an uncomfortable looking angle. “Hola, Oikawa-san! Hola, Wing-san!” he says cheerily. _Wing-san_. That better not stick.

When the taller boy cranes his head the same way to see them, he immediately flips his legs over the side of the bed and rolls onto his stomach to look at them normally. “Wow!” he exclaims, then immediately clutches his head. “Woah. Headrush. But wow! Nice wings!” He jumps to his feet and bows deeply for a second. “Tanaka Ryuu! Assistant head of security!”

The boy bows back. Now that the man is standing upright, he can see the red tunnels in his ears, the septum ring, the scar on his cheek. It’s the scary looking bouncer from last night, only he doesn’t look so scary when he’s swaying with a headrush.

“Hey, how come you knew him and I didn’t?” Tanaka asks Noya as he sits back down, this time with his back against the bed and his legs stretched out in front of him.

“I met him last night while I was on break. You were working!”

Oikawa crosses his arms and leans against the doorframe, a smirk pulling at his lips as he watches the two of them converse.

“Hey, like half the staff was on break when you were! Did _everyone_ meet him except me?” Tanaka yelps.

“He hasn’t met Owl-nim yet. Or Refreshing-ssi or Yaku-nim,” Oikawa pipes in.

“I’m sure he’ll like Bokuto-san,” Noya laughs.

“He and Akaashi should be here soon,” Tanaka says, tapping his chin. “He wanted to run a new routine by Ukai-san or something.” Tanaka winks, “I heard this one’s supposed to be like, _super_ raunchy. His parents are going to be extra disappointed in him.”

Noya elbows him in the ribs and murmurs, “He’s eighteen now, and don’t be cruel.”

“Would you like to go back out front and wait for them?” Oikawa asks, ignoring the pair on the floor, “Or you can hang out in your room until everyone has arrived. Or with Chibi-ya.”

A people break sounds nice. Spending the last eight years bumming around the area has certainly made him accustomed to people, but he's much more used to just being ignored. Their attention is something else entirely, and it weighs heavy in his bones.

He places a hand on his chest, fingers spread, and ducks his head. It doesn't mean anything specific that he knows of, but he hopes Oikawa understands.

“Mm, by yourself, yes?” Oikawa hums.

He nods, and Oikawa lets him escape to his room.

It's peaceful when he gets there, quiet and blissfully untouched, everything right where he left it. The bedspread and thin sheet are rumpled, the late afternoon sun casting hazy shadows since it can’t fight its way into the room. He takes a moment to complete a small circle against the walls, running his fingertips over the fading paint and dusty windowsill. Sure it's a little dirty, but it's _his,_ and that's all he can ask for. (And there's nothing a little Windex can't clean.)

It’s his bedroom. Not his cage, not his park bench, not his shelter futon, not his playground tunnel. His bedroom, with industrial carpeting and single bed and creaky dresser.

He flops onto his bed on his stomach, stretching his wings out behind him as far as they’ll go. It feels nice, for a few moments, then he lets them settle onto his back and over the edge of the bed. He thinks about Oikawa, and everyone else he met today.

They all seem to have a sort of bond, a closeness like that of what he assumes is a family. A heavy atmosphere hung in the air when he arrived last night, alcohol and intimacy that seemed to blanket the place. This morning, he found it replaced by an air of casual familiarity, something safe. Like people could belong here.

But he doesn't know if _he’ll_ belong here.

He thinks about Oikawa fawning over Iwaizumi, Iwaizumi’s quiet and hidden smiles back at him.

He thinks about Noya and Tanaka’s easy banter as they lay on the floor, laughing and taking jabs at each other.

He thinks about how easily Hinata and Yamaguchi kept up a conversation despite the language barrier between them, thinks about how Kageyama watched Iwaizumi’s hands with rapt focus as he was instructing him, Tsukishima’s lifted hand in a brief wave as they were heading back to Noya’s room, Ukai’s gentle and unobtrusive questions.

They all exist here in a practiced ease, and he’ll have to insert himself into it somehow.

 

Oikawa comes to get him when he’s half asleep, curled up facing the door with his wings draped around him, clouds and birds dancing through his half-conscious mind.

“Everyone's excited to meet you,” Oikawa says with a smile. “They're all in the pit when you're ready. Would you prefer if I waited?”

He nods. He needs another minute to get himself up, but if he has to go in there alone he knows he’ll never do it. So Oikawa stands patiently by the doorway while the boy slowly sits up, stretches, and gets to his feet. He waits for Oikawa to turn into the hall before following him, one hand curled in the material of the older boy’s shirt.

Laughter from the pit grows louder as they approach, and it’s apparent why as soon as they step in. Noya has somehow clambered his way up on top of the lockers and stands proudly in a pale apricot crop top and denim cutoff shorts, twerking. Oikawa covers the boy’s eyes.

He pushes Oikawa’s hand away when he hears a startled yell and a cry of, “Run!” It sounds like Tanaka.

When his eyes adjust he sees the black-haired, western eyed security guard from last night, Daichi. Standing at the stage entrance, arms crossed over his chest and glaring at the crowd of employees, he looks for all the world like a Pissed Off Dad. Noya _leaps_ off the top of the lockers and makes a beeline for the tunnel, slipping past him and Oikawa, laughing as he disappears down the hall.

Turning to look at Daichi again, the winged boy does a double take. Not at the security guard himself, but at the boy now standing behind him with a hand on his shoulder. The boy with gray hair swept neatly to one side, a beauty mark under his eye, and a wide smile on his face as he looks at everyone else in the pit.

 _Suga_ , the boy tries to say, but his lips only form around the word as air slips out of him. It would have been silent anyway, because all of the air is gone from his chest in this moment, replaced with the feelings he’s been ignoring for years: the love, the safety, the admiration, the hurt, the abandonment, the bitterness…

There's no way Suga could have actually heard that, but his gaze drifts across the room until it settles on the wings curled around his arms, then slowly, painfully slowly, drags up to his eyes. “Tori?” he shudders on an exhale.

Most of the staff have turned back to their conversations, but he ignores the few people who have their eyes on him as he rips away from Oikawa and throws himself across the floor and up the two steps to where Suga stands, launching himself into his open arms.

Suga is laughing as he wraps his arms around the younger boy’s back, squeezing as tears find their way to his own eyes. They stand there, just holding each other for another minute, until Daichi clears his throat awkwardly.

“You know him?” he asks Suga, head tilted to the side in a look of confusion that the smaller boy has often seen on Suga himself.

“Yes!” Suga smiles, still sounding breathless. “I met him – oh, three years ago? Three and a half? – at one of the shelters I was staying at. I haven’t seen him in two years!” With this he crushes the boy against his chest again, and he’s all too happy to sink into the embrace, negative feelings forgotten. “You look older,” Suga mutters into his hair. The boy nods, noting that they’re both taller, his eyes now level with Suga’s shoulders instead of his chin.

Other people begin to take notice of their reunion, and cheers and applause begin to rise from the crowd at the other side of the pit. He pulls away to look over at them, smiling shyly as Suga puts an arm around his shoulders and smiles serenely.

“I guess you already know Refreshing-ssi,” Oikawa says when the cheering dies down and he crosses the pit to stand beside them.

He nods happily.

Oikawa beckons to the crowd as it starts to dissipate to its own separate conversations again, and two people step forward: a man of average height with muscley arms and wild salt and pepper hair pointed up in two spikes, and a much shorter man with choppy brown hair. “This is Owl-nim and Yaku-nim,” Oikawa smiles, “The last of our staff.”

“Bokuto Koutarou!” the man with pointed hair announces, falling into a quick bow. He looks to be a year or so older than Oikawa. “Nice to meet you! You’re pretty, I like your wings! Listen, I’m a security guard, so if anyone ever gives you trouble I’m your guy, got it?!” His words all spill into the next ones in his rush to get them out, certain ones quick and short while others are long. It’s a lot to focus on.

Bokuto waits patiently for the boy to process all the information. He smiles a little nervously, signs thank you for the compliments, and takes a moment to bow back. Looking satisfied, Bokuto trots away.

The shorter one – he’s even smaller than the winged boy – bows before him. “Yaku Morisuke,” he smiles, calm and kind, and the boy immediately likes him. “I’m a backup dancer, so I’m back here more often than out there. If you ever need anything, don’t hesitate to find me.” He leaves with another small smile and a wave thrown over his shoulder.

Oikawa comes up as he leaves, pats him on the head until his hand is swatted away. “There you have it, Neko-ya.” _Neko-ya_. He hopes he isn’t expected to respond to whatever names people come up for him on the spot. “You’ve met everyone.”

He nods, glancing around the pit and assigning names to each face.

“Welcome to the family,” Suga smiles.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the program i use to double check grammar just about had a heart attack every time yamaguchi spoke
> 
> lemon balm tea reduces stress


	5. You Lust For My Life

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hello this is a Big Ol' filler chapter focused on Appearance which is ahhh COOL but i absolutely hate it thx. also sorry for postin so late in the e v e n ing and typin like a madman i was just in class till seven thirty and am having ISSUES with next year's HOUSING so i'm. a little stressed. yeah Anyway enjoy

**January 2016 – Month two**

 

Four weeks and three days ago, the boy entered Tomcat for the first time. He signed a contract with Ukai Keishin, began training under Hinata, learning how to dance from Oikawa. He unpacked his bag for the first time ever, found homes within the room for his meager belongings.

And despite his fear of not fitting in, he quickly realized that there was nothing to worry about. The staff is a wild collection of mixed races and languages, sexualities and skill sets, interests and music tastes. Everyone stands out so much from each other that he’s just another fantastical piece to their puzzle.

Right now he’s a waiter. It’s easy enough, though the outfit feels a little ridiculous: tiny, tight canary yellow and black shorts that barely cover his butt, he’s just thankful there’s a gap between his thighs so the fabric doesn’t rub against itself and ride up. The top is an absurd black thing, impossible to get on, composed entirely of straps he assumes are meant to look like intricate bondage rope. Fluffy calico cat ears sit in his hair, and he’s barely escaped anyone drawing whiskers on his face.

(Yamaguchi said _he’d_ had to do it his first week, it was customary for all new employees to. Oikawa said they’d only done that to him because they thought he’d look cute.)

((And he did, Oikawa whips out his phone and scrolls through picture after picture of Yamaguchi dressed like a sexy cat.))

Now he stands in front of one of the vanity mirrors, Noya next to him as he dabs glitter along Oikawa’s high cheekbones. The boy tugs absently at some of the straps criss-crossing his torso to keep them from digging into his skin, lifts one leg to tap his shoe on more comfortably – he still wears his old shitty red converse – ruffles his wings and combs his fingers through his hair.

His _hair_. If he’s being honest, he doesn’t really like it much, now that he has time to worry about minuscule things such as his hair instead of whether he’s going to be jumped in an alley or when he’s going to eat next. Growing up in the lab, an intern kept it chopped short, leaving it uneven and messy and falling all over the place.

He didn’t do much with it after he got out, just let it grow out and did the same thing but a little more carefully, even had to tie it up a few times when he couldn’t get his hands on scissors.

Now it just hangs around his face, the tips of it brushing his neck in a dark curtain that frankly he finds quite ugly. He wonders if Yamaguchi’s hair is brown or black, naturally, and if he dyes it because he doesn’t like it. He knows Ukai’s hair is bleached, has seen the black roots underneath. And _Bokuto’s_ hair… He doesn’t know what the hell is going on with that guy.

The clock on the wall ticks, ticks, ticks, closer and closer to the three. (He’s on what they call the late shift tonight, working right up until three, but at least he doesn’t have to do closing: three to five, cleaning up the debris left over.) As much as he’d like to spend his last ten minutes hiding back here, he knows he can’t, so he pushes the hair out of his eyes and dons the cat ears again, scowling at Oikawa’s cooing as he leaves the pit.

Going up the stairs to the loft area takes as long as he can make it – he isn’t particularly eager to be hit on by drunk men who will try to touch his wings, convinced they’re just props until he’s forced give a small demonstration, the whole situation made mildly worse by the overlying stench of alcohol and drunk shouting.

(He’s just whining. This job immerses him in the atmosphere, the heaviness of the music mixed with the air of lust and desire and intoxication. And that atmosphere falls away as soon as he steps into the pit, becomes one of playfulness and familiarity, kindness and acceptance.)

His first new table is three young men with dyed hair and pierced ears and tattoos, sitting and laughing. He bows to them, taking his notebook out of the waistband of his shorts and the red pen out from behind his ear, holding it above the page and tilting his head.

“What’s the matter?” one of the men laughs when he doesn’t offer more of a greeting, “Cat got your tongue?”

Because he doesn’t hear _that_ joke fifty times every night.

But it’s part of his job to be polite, so he just smiles sadly and lifts a hand to his throat, nodding, as if it’s just a sore throat, instead of a harsh reminder of raw cheeks and hand imprints just for giving indicators of pain. But he’s just lost his voice, as far as these boys care.

He takes their orders without further incident, though they all whistle and leer at his wings. (“Those are fuckin’ _cool_ , man.” “Yeah, seriously, sexy.” “You hidin’ anything else from us, baby doll…?”)

He smiles as warmly as he can at them as he takes small steps away from their hands, before moving onto a table of girls nearby to ask about refills. They’re already slightly drunk, but they’re also slightly kinder. Their comments mostly consist of calling him cute, and his smile for them is a little more real.

Hopping down the stairs to the bar takes much less time than going up, and he waits for Kageyama to place all of the drinks in a neat circle on the tray before handing it back without a word. He likes Kageyama.

He runs the drinks back up to the second floor, hands the girls their refills and the boys their first serving, then deposits his tray to the bar and disappears back to the pit.

It’s nearly empty when he walks in. Empty of people anyway, the vanity tables are covered in makeup and glitter and bits of costumes, clothes hang out of the lockers and all over the benches. But as far as people, it’s just Yaku sitting at a table in the corner, typing away at his laptop. He looks up when the boy walks in, smiling warmly at him before getting back to work.

Smiling back briefly, he kicks off his old shoes and ditches the cat ears on the closest table, then jumps in one of the showers. He strips down after closing the curtain, balling up his work clothes chucking them over the top. The hot water pounds against his shoulders and back, relaxing his muscles and easing the tension that has settled in his bones.

He soaks until the count of sixty, then scrubs the smell of sweat and beer and other people's perfume from his skin. Wrapped in a towel, he scurries away to his room when he's finished.

Every item of clothing he owns was once someone else’s. Sweatpants – old and worn, only four hundred yen from the thrift store a block away from the club. A too large t-shirt – stolen from Oikawa in the last few days of his chaos cram packing, it’s loose enough that he can just chill with his wings under it comfortably. He rubs the towel over his hair before slinging it around his neck to walk it back to the pit; there’s a washer and dryer in a side room off of to the side.

Akaashi and Bokuto have been added to the room when he walks in, Bokuto hopping about picking up towels while Akaashi sits by the vanity tables, doing something blocked by his body.

“Hey hey hey!!” Bokuto cheers when he sees him. “What’s up, kid? Can I have that towel, or is it soaked?”

He screws up his face in exaggerated disgust, shaking his head and clutching the towel. It’s all wet, and was just rubbed all over his body.

“Try to stick to clean towels please, Bokuto-san,” Akaashi mutters.

The boy nods his agreement, watching curiously as Bokuto huffs and goes to collect from someplace else. “Akaashi’s gonna cut and dye my hair,” the older boy says by way of explanation, digging through the cabinet that holds clean towels by the washer and dryer. The boy joins him in the corner, dumping his own towel into the washer.

“I’m not _dying_ it, Bokuto-san,” Akaashi says from the other corner, half turned around to look at them, “I’m just bleaching it. And toning,” he tacks on as an afterthought. He starts to mumble to himself, “Why I’m doing this at _three in the morning,_ I don’t know, but, it’s fine, I don’t need to sleep or anything.”

“Yeah, yeah, that,” Bokuto waves his hand dismissively, as though he cannot be bothered by the details. “Wanna watch?” he asks excitedly. His eyes are wide and golden, and the boy really doesn’t have anything else to do, so he agrees. He quickly stops by the fridge to grab a container of strawberries before following Bokuto over to the line of vanity tables, where Akaashi has finished what he now recognizes as mixing bleach.

Bokuto spreads the towels around and sits down, wiggling in his seat for a moment until Akaashi places a steady hand on his shoulder.

“Calm down, Bokuto-san.” He sounds almost bored, but there’s a hint of a smile tugging at the corner of his lips.

“I know, I know. Just leftover adrenaline, y’know?” Bokuto runs his palms over his thighs a few times. “Shit can happen at any second out there, gotta be ready to _pounce_ on it!” He grins, but the winged boy isn’t sure if that cat pun was intended. Bokuto can be kind of dense sometimes, but usually not when it comes to bad jokes.

“Yes, well, your shift is over, I’m through dancing for tonight, and Iwaizumi-san and Sawamura-san and Tanaka-san are all out there. You have nothing to worry about.”

“Right, yeah, task at hand,” Bokuto mumbles to himself. It sounds like a phrase he repeats often. He sets to work removing the small black plugs from his ears, as well as the silver cuff along the outer shell. Kozume takes a chair from Yaku’s little table and carries it over to sit beside the other two, pulling his feet up and popping a strawberry in his mouth once he’s seated.

Akaashi attempts to rake a comb through Bokuto’s stiff hair for a full minute before huffing in frustration. “Go wash your hair in the bathroom sink,” he snaps, pointing toward the tunnel. “You’ve got enough hairspray in there to petrify Yaku-san.”

“Hey!”

Bokuto rushes off.

Akaashi sighs and picks up the corner of a towel, wiping down the comb. “If it’s not too forward, Tori-kun,” he starts after a moment. The boy looks up at him. He’s grown accustomed to responding to all sorts of names: Suga and Akaashi call him Tori-kun or Tori, Oikawa calls him Neko-ya, most of security has been calling him Kid, and everyone else just sort of rotates between the three.

Ukai and Oikawa are the only ones who know about his family name, as far as he knows, but even they don't use it, for which he’s thankful.

He blinks, signifying Akaashi to go on.

“I’ve noticed you don’t seem to like your hair much, am I correct?”

Another blink, this time in mild surprise, then a nod.

Akaashi breaks eye contact, placing the comb on the table and reaching for a strawberry. The boy holds the container out to him. “I could dye it for you, if you’d like,” he offers before popping it in his mouth and chewing. “Or perhaps Hinata-kun could, he knows more about it than I do.”

He considers this as Akaashi takes another strawberry, grumbling about how he wishes he had a knife to cut away the stem. He really does hate his hair, wonders if changing the color would make it better. Or maybe he needs a haircut. Probably both. He definitely has to think about it, though, so he tilts his head to the side and lifts one shoulder a bit, then settles his chin on his knees and waits for Bokuto to come back.

 

Most of his free time is spent exploring the club. He likes looking for hiding places, small spaces, closets, and doors marked with Employees Only. His room is nice, and he appreciates that the small space is his, but he likes to know every corner of a place. Knowing the terrain gives you a higher ground.

The doors he finds lead to closets with cleaning supplies, maintenance stairways, the liquor room, the bar kitchen. Anything locked he seeks out Sawamura, head of security and one of three people with a set of keys to any and every door. (Him, Ukai, and the elusive floor manager he has yet to meet in more than passing. He seems kind.)

His latest fascination is with the DJ booth. It’s way up high, nestled in the corner of the second floor, and the lower three feet or so are solid wood before giving way to glass at the top. If he sits, comfortable on the plush rug, wings limp and spread out over the floor, he can’t be seen from outside of the room.

It’s more or less soundproof, would be completely soundproof if he put on the headphones attached to the turntables. It’s a good place to go when he gets headaches during work, which the other employees assure him will go away with time, or when he just wants to be alone in the quiet for a while.

Of course, the DJ booth belongs to Tsukishima Kei. The eighteen year old blond spends pretty much all of his time in the small room, unless one of the waiters is out and he has to fill in. Thanks to their latest staff member he rarely has to do that anymore, so the boy has almost never seen him outside of his booth.

They become fairly close, sitting up there with nothing really to distract them except for, of course, Tsukishima’s job. He learns that the other boy’s hair is naturally that blond – both of his grandparents on his dad’s side are from Germany – that he hates wearing contacts and very much prefers his glasses, he’s a freshman at college for sound design, likes indie music and Yamaguchi’s freckles, and that he can operate the turntables like he’s been doing it since birth.

He learns that he usually starts the night with a sweatshirt on, but ends up in a tank top, and whenever he lifts his left arm there’s a flash of black ink.

(Whenever he lifts his right arm there’s a collection of small, perfectly circular scars on the inside of his elbow, maybe half a centimeter in diameter. He’s seen Ukai smoke enough cigarettes to know the size matches, and wonders how long it’s taken those scars to fade to such a dull color.)

The boy has spent a lot of time wondering about this black ink. It’s a tattoo, he knows, growing up on the streets has made him quite familiar with them, but he wants to know what it _is._ He asks about it – kind of – one night when he’s finished waiting tables and Tsukishima is tired, opting to put on a pre-recorded mix instead of doing it himself.

He flops back in the extremely padded spinning desk chair, sighing as he locks his fingers behind his head and closes his eyes. He opens them again when he feels the light touch of the other boy’s foot on his ankle, looks down to see the skinny leg outstretched so the toes of his battered shoe touch the hem of his jeans.

“What’s up?” Tsukishima asks. He’s adjusted well to having one-sided conversations, given how easily he reads people. It kind of unnerved the shorter boy at first, but he quickly found it was more of a convenience than anything.

He points to the underside of Tsukishima’s arm, where the tattoo sits, plain as day.

“Oh yeah. Like it?”

He takes a few moments to study it, having never gotten a good look before. It’s very simple, he realizes immediately, just a few small fireflies in black ink, with gold ink making up the light they’re meant to give off.

Without thinking, he raises his right hand to hover a few inches away from his face, fingers spread, then moves them in the tiniest circular motion as he curls them in, ending with a letter A handshape down by his mouth.

 _Pretty_.

Tsukishima doesn’t understand, of course, but the boy’s facial expression is enough to tell him he likes it. A question overtakes his features, however, and Tsukishima has to guess.

“Why fireflies?” he tries.

The boy nods.

“Well… the easy answer is my given name can be read as firefly. The other answer is…” He runs his fingers through his hair nervously, briefly swipes at the small silver ring in his nose with his thumb. “Well, I spent a lot of time looking for something, for a reason, y’know? A reason to keep going, not to waste away. Things felt kinda pointless to me for a while, when I was younger, and I acted pretty stupid. I smoked all the time, I was always fucking around with… Well.” He clears his throat before a small, private smile overtakes his face, and he glances away. “Someone I met when I first started college told me that I didn’t need to keep searching for a reason. That I make my own light.”

The boy stares, because shit that’s kinda deep, then a knowing smile creeps onto his face, causing Tsukishima to huff.

“Yes, Yamaguchi told me that.”

He wiggles his eyebrows at Tsukishima until he’s kicked out.

 

Despite how much most of security reminds him of people who were a threat to him when he was living on the streets, the boy finds that they make quite good company. He’d been skeptical of all of them, at first, given that they’re all much older than him, combined with Iwaizumi’s large muscles, Daichi’s stern expression, and Bokuto’s sleeve tattoo, but with time he learned that most of them were essentially harmless to him.

Spending that night with Bokuto and Akaashi as they dyed hair had been his turning point for Bokuto; despite how loud and restless he had been the entire time, he never once came close to accidentally smacking Akaashi while gesturing, and it only took a few soft words from the other boy to calm him down every once in a while. He was just a big softie, the boy had realized by the end of the few hours he’d sat with them.

Sawamura Daichi, of course, had gained his trust the moment Suga had told him they were dating. He’d done a great deal of squinting, because Suga was eighteen and Daichi was twenty one, but watching the amount of love they interacted with, he’d let it go. It had also stung more than he’d expected to hear – he’d assumed he was over the crush he’d developed on Suga as a child. Some things don’t fade, apparently.

But regardless of his feelings for Suga, if he trusts Daichi then the boy does too. (And he likes him even more after he starts unlocking any door he’s asked to.)

Iwaizumi had seemed especially daunting at first, with his huge arms and permanent scowl, but as soon as he got near Oikawa, something about him seemed to soften. They’d exchange careless banter, an endless stream of airy flirting, and Iwaizumi would defend anyone Oikawa tried to pick on, the winged boy included. Iwaizumi was so protective of the younger boy, and the rest of the dancers, that he couldn’t help but feel safe around him.

That left only Tanaka, who had been guarding the door the very first night he spoke to Ukai. Apparently Ukai – headstrong, kind hearted, half American Ukai – is his uncle, has been playing the role of his father since Tanaka and his older sister – a former bartender he’s never met – were children. He’s seen him around a few times, usually with Noya if they’re not working, and it’s not that he doesn’t _trust_ him, it’s just that…

Well…

Yeah. That’s exactly it.

He has no logical reason not to trust him, he knows, but he can’t help it. The ‘trying too hard to be scary’ look he has going on at all times is actually a little scary. Between his shaved head, the bright red tunnels in his ears, the scar covering half his face and neck, and the septum piercing that Noya tells him reminds him of a Spanish bull, he looks like a small Yakuza member.

But it seems he doesn’t have a choice but to hang out with him when there comes a day off and the only people at the club are the ones who live there: just him, Noya, and Yamaguchi. Oikawa has already moved in with Iwaizumi, and Ukai and Takeda don’t usually feel the need to hang around on their days off. Ukai trusts them enough not to destroy his club.

He’s just relaxing in his room – alone, quiet, it’s wonderful – when there’s unnecessarily loud knocking at his door. Annoyed, he gets up to answer it, thinking sarcastically, ‘who could it _possibly_ be?’

As expected, it’s Noya, standing only in his boxers and a worn t-shirt and grinning widely. The boy doesn’t know _how_ he isn’t freezing, not even goosebumps rise on his skin. His hair falls down over his forehead, covering all the rings in his ears but not the one in his eyebrow. “Hola Neko-chan!” he says happily, “Yama and Ryuu and I need another person for even teams, you wanna play Steven Universe Soccer with us?”

He blinks, trying to process the information quickly enough that Noya won’t get bored.

Tanaka is here – big, scary Tanaka with his manic expressions and loud voice.

They’re playing video games – something he’s watched the rise of through store windows his entire life, but never gotten to experience.

They want him to play _with them_ – him, the oddity, the freak among strangers, they’ve reached out and want to include him in their fun. He decides not to think about it too much. Carpe diem, and all that.

He follows Noya to his room.

Tanaka is lying on the bed, on his side with his back against the wall, head propped up on one hand as he chats with Yamaguchi. The younger boy is sitting cross-legged on the floor and leaning his arms and head on the bed, stringing together his words as best he can. There are two wireless Xbox controllers resting within reach of both of them, a third by Tanaka’s hips. Bowls of chips also lie around, along with cans of soda and juice.

“He says he’ll play!” Noya cheers as they enter the room. Tanaka cheers as well, as Noya jumps onto his bed, leaning back against his friend’s stomach and picking up the controller by his hips. Yamaguchi turns around to face the TV, patting the space beside him on the floor to invite the boy to sit. He hands over the last controller, explains all the buttons as Noya flicks through settings too quickly for him to keep track of.

He picks Garnet as his character, because he likes her sunglasses, and Yamaguchi quickly tries to explain the entire game of soccer in his choppy Japanese in the third of a second the game takes to load. (“Two nets, we kicking ball into another side, not let Noya-san get ball in this side.”)

He understands well enough, and even manages to score a few goals by the end of the first round. He and Yamaguchi are no match for Noya and Tanaka, but he’s very much enjoying the game.

The four of them get absurdly into it. Every time Tanaka scores he throws all of his limbs in the air and draws out the word “GOOOOAAAAAL!!” until he runs out of breath.

Yamaguchi shoves his controller every which way as he plays, as if that will help him get around the other team. He nearly hits both of them in the face a number of times, but it makes him look younger and happier, so the boy just continues to duck.

Noya is shouting in Spanish the whole time – good or bad, the boy can’t tell, but it’s definitely enthusiastic. Every once in a while he’ll throw his wings in the air, blocking Noya and Tanaka’s view until Noya shouts, “¡Parásito!” _Pest!_ and swats them away.

Eventually, it can no longer hold Noya’s attention. He groans loudly at the end screen – he and Tanaka won again – and the boy turns around to see him slouched against Tanaka, who still hasn’t moved. “I’m booooored,” Noya groans as he flops forward, hanging over the edge of the bed with his head right beside the boy’s.

He’s about to reach up to pat his head when he notices a small tattoo, peeking out from behind his ear. He touches it gently, and Noya lifts his head to see the look of confusion.

“Oh yeah!” he cries, jumping back up to a sitting position. Tanaka groans and nearly spits chips all over Yamaguchi as he’s kicked in the stomach. “Check it out, Ryuu and I have matching tattoos!” He turns his head and holds his ear forward so everyone can see the tiny dragon, curling around the space between his ear and his hairline. “Pretty sick, huh?”

The boy looks to Tanaka, waiting to see his apparently matching tattoo. He hadn’t noticed anything before, but apparently he hadn’t been looking hard enough because after he finishes choking, Tanaka folds his ear forward to reveal the same tattoo.

“Ryuunosuke means _assistance of a dragon,”_ he coughs. “Check it out. Have one on my ankle, too.” He pulls up his sweatpants to reveal another dragon, this one more intricate and colored, curling around his ankle and up his calf. “And you aren’t supposed to tell people about them,” he scolds Noya, “We’re both minors.”

Noya waves his hand dismissively. “You’re almost twenty.”

“Not really, not until March –”

“I’ve got another one too!” Noya cries, ignoring his best friend. He yanks his boxers down one side of his hip so he’s barely covered. The boy looks away instinctively, but his eyes are drawn back by the design inked on his hip.

It’s done all in black, a simple sun disappearing behind classic Asian style waves.

“My full name means the evening sun that sets in the western valley,” he explains, for once sounding serious. “My name is all Japanese, even though my mom and her whole family were from Spain. I don’t really like my dad’s family name, or I guess I really just don’t like his family, but I like the meaning!”

Yamaguchi nods appreciatively as the other boy studies the tattoos. They’re wonderful, he thinks, personal and beautiful. He’s always admired tattoos, aesthetically speaking and from a distance, because the only people he knew who had them were dangerous if one got too close, and he likes them even more when they’re up close like this. Maybe someday he’ll get one too.

 

_He stands alone in a room._

_It looks like a traditional Japanese bedroom, emptied of a futon and dresser and desk, or maybe a very small classroom, emptied of desks and chairs and a blackboard. There are no windows or lights that he can see, but the room is bright, the thin walls glowing as if the sun is just outside._

_There is a noise behind him suddenly, just a small sound like a distant train or the creak of a floorboard on another level of the building, but he turns to investigate as a reflex. When his eyes refocus, he is in a different room._

_The walls are dark, they appear to be made of metal. He is behind the bars of a cell, staring at the other half of the room. There is no door to either the bars or the room, but he recognizes the panels beside both that should open them. Light now streams from a small space above his head, but he knows without turning that the window is not there._

_Whatever sound that made him turn is nowhere to be seen, but it’s been forgotten by now anyway. He stands still, feeling as though he’s waiting._

_Without warning, something touches his ankle._

_Reflexively, he jerks away, but his feet suddenly feel heavier than lead, refusing to let him step away from the hand that feels like it’s sliding up his leg._

_Unable to move, he tries to cry out instead, but another hand slaps down over his mouth, keeping in a sound he wouldn't be able to make anyway._

_Hands, too many to count and none to be seen, slide over his skin. They wriggle under his clothes, stroke his skin, touch his wings. None of them press too hard, scratch, pinch, are anything other than gentle, but it’s still so invasive. They force his legs apart, force his arms away from his body, tickle over his thighs, hips, biceps, shoulders, neck, and he wants to scream but there are still fingers over his lips._

_Instead he starts to cry, hot tears spilling over his cheeks and lips despite the invisible hand still clamped there. His nose fills with mucus, he can’t breath, the hand won’t move, and he passes out._

His eyes open.

He’s sitting at a vanity table in the pit, arms crossed on the surface, head resting on them. His neck is stiff, and he lifts one hand to rub at it, the other smoothing down his body to brush away the lingering feeling of all those hands.

The room is empty as far as he can see, just one shower running, quiet Spanish words in Noya’s deep voice coming from it. He takes a deep breath – ignores the way it shakes and rattles his lungs – and stands, walking stiffly from the room.

 

“Move your hips slower, when you sway like that,” Oikawa says.

The boy freezes, resets to the beginning of the move and does it again, slower this time.

“That’s it, try not to rush. Going slow is what makes you sexy.”

“You look anything _but_ sexy right now, Trashykawa,” Iwaizumi calls from the bar.

Letting his ridiculous dancing act fall away, the boy straightens his legs and laughs, because it’s _true._ Oikawa has one foot on the ground and is flopped on his back on the runway part of the stage, his arms limp all over the place, and his outfit is even worse than his posture.

Shitty alien pajama pants that the boy _knows_ glow in the dark adorn his legs, ending several inches above his ankles. (He knows it’s just because they’re bunched up, if Oikawa stands they’ll fall to his feet and he’ll trip on them while walking.) He’s wearing his boyfriend’s university hoodie and glasses, and his hair is falling limp around his face.

He is the picture of excellence.

“Iwa-chan is so mean to me!” Oikawa exclaims, lifting his head to look at the bar. “And I’m not _here_ to look sexy right now, I’m here to teach Neko-chan to dance!”

“Oh yeah?” Iwaizumi directs his attention to the boy in front of the pole. “Is he doin’ a good job, Kid?”

As much as he would like to see Iwaizumi tease his mentor a little bit more, Oikawa _has_ taught him quite a lot, and he knows he’s been getting better and better. He nods, and Iwaizumi nods back.

“Impressive. Keep it up, then.”

Oikawa blows him a kiss. “Thanks, Iwa-chan!” Iwaizumi pretends to catch the kiss dramatically, closing his eyes and holding a hand over his heart before he goes back to what he was doing. “Okay,” Oikawa returns his attention, letting his head fall back onto the stage and turning his face, “Go through the routine one more time, then we’ll take a break.”

He does as he’s told, getting back into his starting position as Oikawa motions to Tsukishima up in the DJ booth. The song begins again, and he spends a good two and a half minutes walking in small circles around the pole, sinking down, rising up, biting his lips, fluttering his wings, moving slowly and measuring his steps while trying to remain, as Oikawa calls it, _liquid._

It’s difficult, and Oikawa still has a few pointers when he’s done, but tells him he’s done a wonderful job and that they both deserve a break. (“You _both_ deserve a break? _He’s_ the one doing all the work.” “Hey. I work hard plenty of other nights, you big bully.”)

“Is that my shirt?” Oikawa asks the boy as they step into the pit. He supposes it’s a little hard to recognize, given the giant slits in the back for his wings.

His fingers twist into the hem, holding it down as if he’s afraid Oikawa will try to snatch it right off his body. His shoulders rise defensively before he grabs a pen off the closest vanity table. The rest of the staff have taken to just leaving pens hanging around everywhere in an attempt to facilitate his communication. He appreciates it.

He pushes up the sleeve of Oikawa’s hoodie and plainly writes, _I’m sorry, I don’t have any others,_ on his forearm.

Oikawa blinks at him. _“None?”_

 _I have three shirts, not counting my work clothes,_ he takes a while to write legibly.

The older boy just stares at him. He stares back. “Suga-ssi,” he says flatly, looking over to the bench where Daichi and Suga sit facing each other, talking. Suga leans around his boyfriend’s broad shoulder to raise his eyebrows at Oikawa. “Our darling Neko-ya has absolutely nothing to call his own.”

Hinata pops into the room. Why are there so many people here on their day off?

“We have to take him shopping,” Oikawa declares.

Suga looks at Daichi, whose expression is hidden from them, before turning back to Oikawa and shrugging. “Yeah, okay.”

“I wanna come!” Hinata exclaims, jumping up and down. “Can I come, _please?”_

“Of course, my darling Chibi-ya,” Oikawa smiles.

“Can Kageyama come? I wanna see if I can beat him –”

“Don’t push it.” Oikawa’s tight smile makes the sentence more threatening. “How about it, Neko-ya? Ready to revamp that wardrobe?”

 _Shopping_. He’s never really been shopping, unless you count stealing from run down shops or spending months scraping together enough change to replace shirts that are so worn down they won’t even stay on his body. He nods enthusiastically.

“Great!”

The boy grabs Oikawa’s arm as he starts to turn away, flipping it over to write on the even paler underside. _I don’t have any money._

“Well, for one,” Oikawa starts, taking the pen away from him and capping it, “You’ve got about a month’s paycheck just waiting to be spent – assuming you talked to Appa about a bank account?” He means Ukai-san, calls him Dad in Korean, and the boy nods. “Right, so you have that, but this’ll be our treat. An official welcome present!”

“It’s a month late,” Suga says from where he’s fetching his jacket out of his locker.

“Better late than never!” Hinata chimes in as he bounds up.

“You see,” Oikawa sticks his tongue out at all of them, “Chibi-ya supports me.”

 

They leave ten minutes later – after the boy has showered and Oikawa has put on real pants and a second jacket – but they really don't go far. Oikawa just steps out the front door and spreads his hands with a smile and says, “Lead the way, Neko-ya.”

He hasn't left the club much in the last month, but he still knows the area like the back of his hand. He starts walking toward a nearby clothing shop, shoving his hands in the pockets of a jacket borrowed from Iwaizumi, wings tucked under it. Hinata falls into step beside him while Suga and Oikawa start up a conversation behind them.

Hinata chatters and takes pictures as they walk, telling him about this store and that store and how Natsu likes this street because she saw a cat here but not that one because she saw a scary looking guy there… he never stops listening, but kind of lets Hinata's voice fade into the background, nodding along when necessary.

He tugs Hinata to the side by his wrist when they get to the shop he was looking for, watching his face for a reaction.

“Hey!” he says happily, “I get a lot of my clothes here! Can I help you pick stuff?”

The boy nods, smiling shyly at the way his eyes light up.

“Great!” This time Hinata’s hand closes around his wrist and drags him inside, Suga and Oikawa following like amused parents. Hinata bounces around the store, holding up this shirt and that shirt and waiting eagerly for the winged boy’s response. He ends up with a few plain t-shirts and three different jackets, because holy shit he loves jackets, and Oikawa hands over his debit card without blinking.

They go to three more stores, leaving the first two with more clothing than he's probably ever owned in his entire life, let alone all at once. Hinata also buys him a small bracelet, made of braided black cord with three square metal stones set in it at an angle. He tries not to blush as Hinata secures it around his wrist.

The third store they go into is a mildly sketchy looking Radio Shack, but Oikawa assures him it’s perfectly fine and ushers everyone inside. He buys the boy a phone without even batting an eyelash, and they sit on a bench outside for a half an hour while Suga explains calmly how to use it and puts in the numbers of everyone at the club. Hinata insists on being the first person he texts, and they send emojis back and forth for a solid five minutes.

They're back on the street, walking quietly when Hinata begins to yell again. “Neko-chan, Neko-chan! Come in here with me!”

He looks up at the sign. _Seijoh Tattoo and Piercing._ He nods, if a little confused.

“I wanna get my ears pierced!” Hinata explains as they go through the door. “Bokuto-san has his ears _stretched,_ it's so cool! And Noya-san! Noya-san has all those piercings!”

Suga and Oikawa follow behind them, looking politely interested.

Hinata hops up to the desk as the boy sheds his coat.

The boy behind the desk has bleach blond hair, shaved in the back to an undercut like Hinata’s, with several earrings in each ear and tattoos all over one arm. He glances at the boy’s now exposed wings for a second, one eyebrow raising in something that looks like mild surprise, before he turns his attention back to Hinata with a lazy blink. He gets the feeling this boy isn’t phased by much. “Do you have an appointment?” he asks.

“No, do I need one?”

“That depends.” He sounds entirely bored. A silver stud in his tongue flashes every time he speaks. “What are you here for?”

“I'd like to get my ears pierced, please?”

The receptionist looks him up and down, squinting. “How old are you?”

Hinata puffs his chest and declares, “Seventeen!” which is honestly a surprise. Given Hinata’s height, the roundness of his face, his bouncy steps… the boy kind of assumed he was younger.

Doubt leaks into the suspicion on the receptionist’s face, but he shrugs and doesn’t ask for identification. “This way.”

The four of them follow the man past the counter and through the reception area, around a pool table and rows of display cases for sample tattoos. The boy’s eyes linger on those, but he keeps walking. The man leads them past a curtain, into an open room with funny looking benches and tables that he assumes are for tattoos. There’s a little kiosk off to the side, with a chair and brightly lit display case of starter earrings.

The man leads Hinata over to the booth, where he starts oohing and aahing over all the earrings. Kozume stands off to the side, unsure what to do other than nod when Hinata points to a certain pair of earrings.

“Hey, Neko-ya, come here, I’ll show you something cool,” Oikawa says as Hinata unloads a bucket of questions on the piercer manning the station. He has short pink hair and rings through every inch of his ears, as well as two in his nose and three in his eyebrow. He salutes Oikawa briefly, who smiles and waves back before motioning to the winged boy again.

Curious, he follows Oikawa out of the back and over to the tattoo samples, heading directly to a specific spot. Upon closer inspection, he realizes that a lot of the images are actually pictures of the tattoos directly on people’s bodies.

“Look look look,” Oikawa says excitedly. He’s pointing to a frame with two pictures in it, one of a pale, slender hip, and the other of a much tanner, solid wrist. “That’s me!” he says excitedly, jabbing the picture of the hip.

The boy stares. He had no idea Oikawa had a tattoo. He points to his eye, then to Oikawa’s hip. _Let me see_. Oikawa grins at him like he’s sharing a secret – and maybe he is, he’s never heard anyone mention anything about Oikawa having a tattoo, and he’s heard it’s illegal to tattoo anyone under twenty – then pulls the waist of his jeans down a little bit.

The ink looks almost delicate, somehow, but natural, like Oikawa was born with the design on his skin. He thinks it has something to do with how small each spot of ink is. There’s about five unconnected stars, a little crescent moon to the top left and a planet with a ring around it to the bottom right.

“It’s my zodiac symbol,” Oikawa explains, “The constellation for Cancer.” He traces it with his finger. “And Saturn, just because I like the ring.”

The boy points to the second picture that shares Oikawa’s frame.

“That’s Iwa-chan!” Oikawa laughs. “He came with me to get mine done and ended up getting one himself. He was already twenty, so they let him get it done in a more… uncovered spot.” He points to the spattering of stars across Iwaizumi’s wrist and forearm. “Those are the stars of Gemini, his constellation. Cool huh?”

Things click minorly into place, then. A way to hate his appearance a little less. Along with doing something with his hair, he’ll get a tattoo. He doesn’t really know what of, but he suddenly hates how plain his skin looks, unmarked by freckles like Yamaguchi, or laugh lines like Hinata and Noya, or moles like Suga, or tattoos like Tanaka and Tsukishima and apparently Oikawa. He sets his jaw and decides he’s not leaving until he knows what he wants.

It only takes about ten minutes for Hinata to choose his earrings, fill out the paperwork, get his ears pierced, and learn how to clean and take care of his ears as they heal. But they spend two hours in the shop, seated among the tattoo pictures and sample art. The blond receptionist sits behind his desk for a while, watching Oikawa chatter at him as he sifts through frames, but eventually gets up and comes over.

He says to start with location. The receptionist explains which parts of the body hurt the most (over bones and joints and areas of dense muscle) and which hurts the least (fleshy areas such as forearms and thighs). He says to think about visibility; will it be hidden by most everyday clothing? What if he chooses to wear shorts? Or remove his shirt? Will it clash with a work uniform? (They share a secretive smile and tell him that won't be an issue.)

Also on the topic of visibility, he reminds them of the stigma of tattoos in Japan. Traditionally, changing their natural appearance as given to them by their parents and ancestors is frowned upon. However, given the area of the city they live in, it’s a little less than a problem. Yakuza are the law here, not the police, and none of them have ever been all that traditional to begin with. His age won’t be a problem either, so long as he keeps it hidden if he leaves this part of the city.

The boy decides on his left forearm, somewhere he can see it but hide with a long sleeve if absolutely necessary. That's a pretty much painless area, the artist tells him, a good place for a first tattoo.

(Suga, virtually uninterested in permanent ink being repeatedly stabbed beneath the epidermis, leaves around two to get lunch for everyone.)

It's Hinata who suggests he get something bird related, and he latches onto the idea immediately. Not just because of his own wings, he has always admired birds, even envied them. He spent hours as a child, days at a time, peering at the sky out his tiny window, watching them soar through the air, free and unrestrained thanks to the same appendages that weighed him to the ground.

The artist goes behind the curtain for a moment, reappearing a few moments later with two binders in his hands. “We have three artists, but one of them doesn’t really do animals so… I didn’t include his portfolio. But we have an unbelievable amount of birds,” he says as he hands them over. “You can get any one of those designs, or modify one. Or you can schedule an appointment with me or another artist, and we’d be happy to help you create an entirely new design.”

He nods, eagerly accepting the binders.

“Remember, tattoos are permanent and nearly impossible to remove, so make sure you’re happy with the design. Take your time.” He also hands him a business card with four names on it – _Hanamaki Takahiro - piercer, Matsukawa Issei - tattoo artist, Bobata Kazuma - tattoo artist,_ and _Terushima Yuuji - tattoo stylist_ – and their individual phone numbers, as well as the number for the shop.

They return to the club with bags weighing down all of their arms, Hinata’s ears pierced, and Kozume halfway to a tattoo.

Iwaizumi immediately drags Oikawa off and demands to know how he could spend that much money at once, while Bokuto, Noya, Tanaka, and Lev (who appeared at some point while they were out) crowd around Hinata to fawn over his new piercings. They’re simple black studs, since he didn’t like his pearl birthstone and decided to stay with the club theme, and Suga said red, as much as he loved it, would have clashed too much with his hair.

He sneaks off to his room while everyone is distracted, dumping out all his new clothes on the bed to begin sorting them. He needs two piles for all the shirts he got – many of them plain and solid colored, but a few with simple patterns or graphics that Hinata had enthusiastically picked out. He has fewer pairs of pants, just a few pairs of jeans in various gray scale because Oikawa said he looked better in those than in blue ones.

And _jackets_. He has so many jackets. He loves jackets.

As he hears Noya shouting to Hinata that he can borrow any earrings he wants from him, he slips into a pair of soft cotton pajamas and curls up on his bed with his sketch pad, content to draw for the rest of the dwindling daylight.


	6. An Eye For Your Lies

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ~~sorry this is a day late i had classes and was blazed out of my mind all day yesterday~~
> 
> uhh so **WARNING THERE IS ATTEMPTED SEXUAL ASSAULT IN THIS CHAPTER** yeah it uh starts with 'he's about halfway around' and ends more or less w the chapter, but it explicitly ends at 'bokuto's hand slaps down on the man's shoulder'

February 2016 – Month three

 

The skinny, freezing homeless kid Ukai grabbed off the street has transformed, planted roots and grown taller and thicker, sprouted buds and is ready to blossom.

He’s still relatively skinny, that probably won’t change, but now he’s more willowy thin and lean muscle as opposed to protruding, aching bones of malnourishment.

Akaashi spent an evening with him and a pair of emerald handled scissors, evening out the ends of his hair so it hung more gently around his chin. Hinata bleached it all the way to blond. (Difficult and damaging, since his natural hair is deep brown, but he’s using plenty of cheap conditioners and he thinks the blond looks softer against his pale skin.)

Of course, that was two and a half weeks ago and his hair has grown out, natural chocolate bleeding into artificial vanilla so by now he’s closer to blond with ombre roots. Most of security has taken to calling him Pudding Head, dropping any previous names of Kid or Neko-chan.

Several times, he and Hinata go back to the tattoo parlor, sitting down with the same blond designer and coming up with several pre-sketches until he finds one he likes. Hinata sits patiently as one of the actual tattoo artists – who introduces himself as Bobata – dips the stencil in lavender ink and wraps it around his arm. He doesn’t interrupt as the boy lies on one of those weird tables for the next hour and endures the buzz of the needle, just watches the weird American movie playing on the huge TV against the back wall and occasionally takes a picture of his arm.

They leave with a full sheet of aftercare instructions: how to wash it and when, how much ointment to apply and when, what to do, what not to do… The sheet looks complicated, but he realizes after a day that it’s actually very simple. Just leave it alone. Let it heal. So now he has a line of flying bird silhouettes, about fifteen of them, curling delicately around his left arm from his elbow to his wrist in traditional black ink.

He’d gotten his ears pierced while he was there one day too, just for the hell of it, because Hinata said he thought it would make him look cool. He hadn’t cared much for his birthstone, same as Hinata, so he’d gone instead for simple tiny crystals. He’ll have to leave them in for another five weeks or so.

Just as Ukai told him, he is not required to pay rent for living in the club, but he does have to do  _ something _ so he’s not just freeloading. He can’t exactly work more or longer shifts, since pretty much everyone works the same hours give or take (they have two hours of leeway at the beginning or end of the night, so long as they clock out), so Ukai has him working around the club during the day.

(He’s told that Yamaguchi, despite being the same age as the winged boy, manages the club’s website and advertising in exchange for room and board, and Noya has the extra job of being in charge of makeup and costumes.)

Most of the time this ‘extra work’ means fairly gross jobs, like mopping up the ocean of spilled drinks on the dance floor after they kick everyone out at three thirty in the morning, and bleaching the bathroom every twenty minutes, but he doesn’t mind. He finds that he likes the work, enjoys the satisfaction of getting rid of a mess.

Iwaizumi sticks him behind the counter for two days in a row, armed with a bottle of nontoxic glass cleaner and a rag, and has him clean every shot glass, every  _ short _ glass, every water and tall glass, every alcohol bottle… everything he can find.

Oikawa comes over halfway through the second day, presumably looking for Iwaizumi, but stays to ask what on earth he’s doing, sitting on the floor behind the bar and surrounded by cups. He grabs a nearby sharpie and writes 研磨 – polishing – on his own arm.

“Kenma!” Oikawa exclaims, face brightening. “Wouldn’t that be a cute name?” He stands back and taps his chin. “I think it means ‘doom’ in Korean though, so that’s not so great.”

He makes a show of rolling his eyes and ruffling his feathers in annoyance; Oikawa is always trying to name him, he’s had to turn down a plethora of Korean ones because he doesn’t know what they mean. He doesn’t want Oikawa naming him something embarrassing.

Iwaizumi yells at him to stop distracting his new protegee, but calls him Kenma from then on. The ink is harder to wash away than he’d anticipated, so for another two days he has  _ Kenma  _ inked thick and dark on his arm. Everyone who sees picks it up. (And honestly, he kind of really likes it.)

Yamaguchi patiently teaches him to use the washer and dryer in the small room off the pit, as well as how to use the oven/stove in the little kitchen they have. Ukai makes sure there are always cup noodles, but if they want anything more extensive they have to buy it themselves. He’s okay with that. He knows every food place in the city, even if he’s only eaten out of their dumpsters.

 

_ He’s looking at an x-ray machine. _

_ At least, he assumes he is. It doesn’t look like any of the x-ray machines he saw as a child, just a black screen with an electric blue skeleton on it, shifting as he feels his own body moving. He doesn’t stop to think about how that can be if there is no equipment around him, but that’s clearly him on the screen. _

_ He decides to test it, lifting one arm and then the other, kicking his legs, unfurling his wings, watching the skeleton on the screen mimic him. Darkness surrounds him on all sides. He does a few full body rolls, giggles, admires the fluidity of the skeleton. He stands with his legs apart, spreads his arms above his head, stretches his wings to their full span. The screen adjusts to make room, and it feels like flying. _

_ When he stands still again, when he lowers his arms, something shifts in his stomach just above his hip bones. He squints at the screen, watching as it begins to coil slowly upward. Alarm creeps up his spine at the same rising speed as the vines, and he places his hands over his stomach. The x-ray copies him as he begins to claw at his chest, watching as flowers blossom between his ribs, leaves drape over his sternum and collar bones. _

_ The vines ascend up his throat, blocking his air, and he begins to cough and sputter as the flowers fill his mouth, spilling out and overtaking his vision until all he can see are spikes of crimson heather flowers, twisting around his arms, curling between his fingers, overtaking him. _

He shoots up in the bed – his  _ own _ bed, in his own small room – breathing hard, hands clawing at his neck. He doesn’t cry – hasn’t cried in years – but his eyes burn, and he swallows lungful and after lungful of air, continuing to feel around his face and head for remaining petals. The sun is starting to rise outside his window, so he’s only been asleep for a few hours. With a shiver, he pulls the blanket back up and lays down, feeling each breath as it enters his lungs.

 

Even though he’s had the shiny rose gold iPhone for about a month, he rarely uses it. He’s slow at texting, but Shouyou taught him early on how to use his thumbs instead of playing hunt and peck with one finger like an old man. He’s getting a bit better, but he hardly ever texts. The only people he talks to work at the club, so he sees them every night.

To keep him entertained, everyone has been showing him their favorite apps, teaching him how to play. Yaku and Lev show him a cute game where he fills up a food bowl and puts out toys, and cats come to play with them. He becomes enamored with that one right away.

Suga shows him a little simulation that grows succulents, supposedly in real time. All he has to do is check in every few days to remove weeds and water them, as well as the little snail that resides on the rim of the pot.

Daichi smiles as he explains how to lead a koi fish around the pond on screen, eating smaller fish to level up until it turns into a dragon. Kageyama silently demonstrates a game where a small green character jumps up every time he lands on a hovering platform, and turns the screen side to side to move him back and forth, ensuring that he doesn’t fall off the screen and end the game. He enjoys going through all the themes this one offers.

Noya and Tanaka shout over each other as they teach him how to play a game where fruit gets tossed up on the screen, and he has to swipe his finger to slice it. Bokuto takes him for a small walk around the area to demonstrate his app: fictional animals pop up on the map as he walks, he has to capture them to level up. He promises to show him the tv show and movies the game is based on.

Akaashi quietly walks him through the first few levels of a cute game with colored dots, and he has to connect them to clear them from the screen and fulfill other requirements of the level. Iwaizumi takes a while to help him grasp the concept of a rather complicated seeming number game: rows, columns, and boxes of nine, every number has to appear once with no repeats. He likes this one after he gets the hang of it.

Yamaguchi shows him a blue app where he can listen to radio stations based on what genres or artists he likes, but Tsukishima takes him aside later and makes him an account on what he claims to be a much better green music app, where he can do the same thing while also creating playlists of any music he wants.

It’s Oikawa and Hinata who show him social media. “Watch,” Oikawa says as they sit in Tsukishima’s booth listening to some British band Oikawa likes. Something about cold monkeys. They’re eating little bites of fried chicken and fries from a place up the street.

Oikawa lifts his phone until nearly the entire club can be seen on the screen, then presses the circular button on the bottom. There's a little snapping sound effect as he takes the picture. “It's a lot like texting,” he explains as he lowers the phone to show Kenma. “Now I can caption it.” He taps on the screen, and the keyboard comes up. “Here, you write something,” he smiles as he hands his phone over.

The boy considers the picture for a moment before he starts to type.  _ This place looks bigger when it’s empty. _ He hands the phone back.

“I guess it does,” Oikawa agrees as he reads it. “Now look, we can send it to whoever we want.” He clicks away from the keyboard, then hits the send button down in the corner. “These are all the people I talk to a lot,” he explains, pointing to the short list of names with a multitude of emojis and numbers the boy doesn't understand. They range from single digits to several hundred. “There is also…” Oikawa scrolls down. And down, and down, and down. “...All these people. But you obviously don't know most of them. Here, pick who you’d like to send it to.”

Kenma looks through Oikawa’s best friend list, taking a moment to remember who all of his weird nicknames are. Thankfully only a few of them are in Korean, and Oikawa assures him he doesn’t know those people anyway. After some consideration, he sends it to Hinata and Suga.

“Good job,” Oikawa chuckles. “Get your phone out, I'll show you how to add everyone by their numbers.”

The next day, Hinata tackles Instagram.

_ how is this different from snapchat?  _ the boy writes on a receipt for a dozen bagels by his hand. He should probably clean the pit when he gets a chance.

“Very different! Snapchat is more… it's kinda like texting,” Shouyou explains as the app finishes installing. “Insta is more of a general sharing… thing – Hey what's your number? They gotta send us an activation code.”

He holds up his fingers in the order of his phone number, then tries a hundred different usernames until they find one that's not taken.

“So you add people on Snapchat, right? And they gotta add you back for either of you to see anything. On Instagram you follow them,” Shouyou says, clicking on the magnifying glass on the bottom of the screen. He types in what Kenma assumes is his own username as he speaks. “They don't have to follow you back, but most people do! Friendly, y’know? Here, I'll add the rest of the guys.”

Shouyou goes through the people he's following and follows everyone the boy knows, then helps him add a profile picture and bio.

“It’s pretty simple,” he says as the boy scrolls through his feed. “You can like things, comment on them, it’s a lot more ah, public than Snapchat, I guess. You can follow like, interest based accounts too,” he goes on, pointing to the magnifying glass again. “I follow the national volleyball team! I know Noya-san follows a lot of art accounts.”

Kenma clicks through his discover page, follows a few of the artists who come up.

“Actually – here, I’m gonna set your account to private,” Shouyou interrupts after a minute, and clicks through settings as he explains. “Normally I wouldn’t bother, but because we work here, we gotta be a little extra careful about privacy, got it? Try not to mention anything too specific about where you work, ‘kay? Or anything really personal like that you live here or whatever.”

He nods once, understanding the danger of potential stalker customers. He’s heard vague mentions of something involving Oikawa and a customer before he got here, social media stalking, no one will give him details. He has to remember: he’s still in the red light district. Yakuza may bring them free food in exchange for free drinks or dances, but that doesn’t mean they’re safe.

“Oh! And –” Hinata snatches his phone back again, “– Snapchat does this crazy thing now where you can see exactly where people are… I’m deactivating that. It’s insanely accurate. Definitely not something you want.” He watches Hinata move his fingers quickly over the screen.

Back on Instagram, Hinata walks him through the technicalities of posting, explains how he can take a picture right on the app (after he gives it access to his camera) or select from his library. He can go through the filters, adjust them. He asks Kenma if he wants to post something, he writes that he’ll just look, for now.

 

Hinata Shouyou does not live at the club. From what the boy has gathered from Shouyou himself and from other employees, he lives with his mother and sister, Hinata Natsu. His mother is half Scottish, making him and Natsu one-fourth Scottish, which manifests in absolutely nothing but their unbelievably bright hair.

His dad died when he was fourteen, and his mom has been getting worse and worse, relying more on pills than the therapist Shouyou is no longer able to afford for her. The seventeen-year-old dropped out of school a year ago to work full time, both here and at a small store closer to his run down neighborhood.

So no, he doesn't live here, but between visiting Yamaguchi, Kageyama when he's training under Iwaizumi, working here for a year and a half, and now visiting Kenma, he's grown very at home in the place.

And so has his baby sister.

Hinata Natsu is adorable, just as Yamaguchi said the first night they hung out. And just as Shouyou said, he can't always leave her at home with his mother, as she's grown more unsteady over the years since his father’s death. So far she’s never gotten violent, but he’s heard Natsu telling some of the other dancers how she, “Yells mean things at oniisan and makes him cry sometimes.”

Yaku is here tonight even though he’s not working, and it's his responsibility to watch the little girl during the night. He accepts his task willingly, though a bit reluctantly.

He has a video to edit for a class in the afternoon tomorrow, and Natsu requires a good deal of engagement. She’s only six, so they’re sure she’ll only be awake for about an hour after they open at the latest, but that’s about an hour and a half that she is in the club and awake, an hour and a half that Yaku won’t be able to work. He can watch her fine after she goes to sleep, but until then he’s going to need someone to help him.

Unsurprisingly, Kenma can’t do it. He can’t communicate with her enough to keep her engaged, and she’ll make too much of a fuss over his wings, probably, if she’s anything like her brother. He’s told that Suga will usually watch her if Yaku can’t, but he’s called out for some reason tonight.

So the next best option is Noya.

_ That  _ is surprising, the first time Yaku tells him. Noya is usually close to naked, most things out of his mouth are vulgar to the point of shock, and honestly, between his hair, piercings, and reckless movements, the boy isn’t sure he wouldn’t scare off any child who came near him.

But he doesn’t know Noya past the surface until that night, when he walks into the pit to let Shouyou start on his makeup and sees Noya already sitting at the line of vanity tables with Natsu. She’s sitting on the table itself, Noya perched on the bench in front of her as he slowly and carefully paints an intricate butterfly on her cheek with various colors of eyeliner.

He stops in the entryway, stares and blinks until Shouyou appears at his side.

“Noya’s an artist,” he says simply by way of explanation.

The boy pinches all his fingertips together without thinking, places them against his forehead before turning his wrist out, opening his fingers as they move away.

_ I didn’t know. _

Shouyou doesn’t understand, but he touches the boy’s wrist and motions for him to follow.

Natsu’s eyes find them as they approach the tables. “WHOAA, ONIISAN!” she exclaims when she sees them, arms waving up in greeting. Noya quickly pulls the red eyeliner away from her face so he doesn’t mess up his drawing. “Who’s this?!” she asks, gesturing with as much gusto as her brother at the winged boy. He blushes, lifting one hand in a small wave.

Hinata laughs. “This is my friend! Kenma!”

“Kenma!!” the little girl repeats, beaming up at him. “Kenma is like a bird!”

Kenma smiles shyly, stretching his wings a bit for her to see. She whoops and claps.

“Do you guys have to get ready for work?” Noya asks, tilting his head up toward them and for once not yelling.

“Yeah, sorry,” Shouyou frowns, and Natsu mimics his expression.

“Noooo,” she whines, “I want Yuu-nii to finish my butterfly!”

“Hey now!” Noya cries, enthusiasm flooding him as he jumps up to stand straight. Kenma takes a small step back to give him room. “I’ll still finish it, we’re just gonna move over to my room, all right? You can watch a movie on my TV ‘till it’s time for bed, ¿bueno?”  _ Okay? _

Her eyes light up at the prospect, and she nods enthusiastically. The boy doesn’t question Noya’s choice to bring her to his room instead of simply moving to a bench somewhere in the pit, as it’s quickly filling up with employees milling around. He knows they’re waiting for Noya to remove the small child before they start stripping.

“Dices buenas noches, niña,”  _ Say goodnight, kiddo,  _ Noya tells her as he caps the eyeliner in his hand and grabs the other colors lying around. He leaves the black and the white, mumbles, “Hope nobody needs these,” as he pockets the rest of the colors.

Kenma didn’t understand any of Noya’s first sentence, but apparently Natsu did, because she jumps into her brother’s arms. “Goodnight oniisan! I love you!” she does her best to press a kiss to his cheek, and Shouyou laughs. Mostly she just squishes the front of her face against the side of his.

“Love you too, Natsu! Sleep well!” He gently kisses her forehead, then spins her in a circle before kissing her again, this time on the cheek.

“Goodnight, Kenma-nii!” she smiles as Shouyou hands her back to Noya. He lifts his hand and bends his fingers toward her twice in a half-assed wave as she waves enthusiastically over Noya’s shoulder.

“She understands more languages than any of us,” Shouyou says as he watches Noya walk off with his sister. “Everyone just kinda talks to her in their own language, and she just… understands.”

Noya asks her something in Spanish as they step into the tunnel, something about  _ pelicula _ and  _ ver. _

“Ponyo!” Natsu cries back, “She looks like me!”

 

At night he dances, much more than he waits tables. It’s much easier for him, since he doesn’t have to say anything and he’s out of reach of drunk people, for the most part. Unless he’s going around the floor and giving lap dances, like he’ll be doing in a few minutes after he does his last dance.

He loves it. He loves part of it, anyway.

He loves being out of reach, untouchable by dozens of people, staring at him with lust in their eyes and their tongues all but hanging out of their mouths, just short of drooling all over themselves just because he’s swinging his hips in a circle.

He loves the elevation of the stage, putting him just higher than those older than him, allowing him the power and freedom to do what he wants, while they just watch.

For once, he likes how lithe and delicate his body is, sensual, maddeningly slow and teasing and tantalizing, now that he’s perfected that graceful fluid motion Oikawa was always telling him to work on.

He likes being  _ desirable _ . No one has ever wanted him before.

But he hates it. He hates part of it, anyway.

Mostly it’s fine, he can go out on stage and dance like he’s supposed to, even as exposed as he is, and he can collect the money falling around him and wink and flutter and smirk like he’s been taught, and he can even enjoy it. But there are flashes of unease.

(Understatement of the century. More like every now and then there are spikes to his ribs, spikes of self-loathing, terror, heart-stopping fear and anxiety twisting and pressing on his lungs that make his breath stop short and his eyes widen and –)

Customers tell him he's beautiful. Beautiful, sexy, exotic, alluring, tantalizing, enticing. He doesn't feel beautiful. He sometimes feels hollow and exposed, like his skin has all been peeled away to display every nerve, every muscle cord. He feels garish.

 

His main routine is, predictably, as an angel. He’s got the wings for it, of course, all they had to do was slap a halo on him and a few pieces of opalescent silk and he was good to go. More realistically, Hinata does his makeup: white eyeshadow and lots of mascara, a few sparkly sticky rhinestones under his eyes, an unnecessary amount of body glitter… Oikawa tells him he’s his own spotlight.

Noya is in charge of costumes – because he’s the only one of them capable of putting together an outfit that can be described as more than just decent – and he’d been given the task of creating a whole new one for the angel routine, since it’s new and created completely for him.

(It’s not really a set routine, he just starts with one move and lets it flow into another, does whatever he feels the music tells him to.  _ Versatile, _ Ukai compliments him.  _ Poser, _ Shouyou jokingly laughs at him. Even Oikawa admires it.)

As he’s quickly discovered, Nishinoya Yuu is a young man with no shame, and assumes no one else has any either.

So the boy is out there almost every night in nothing but a white g-string and a stringy sort of shirt. It was once a t-shirt (he wouldn’t believe this if he hadn’t seen Tanaka walk in with a whole bag of them) but someone left it alone with Noya and a pair of scissors.

Now it’s sleeveless, cut in vertical strips all the way up to just below his pecs. The strips curl in on themselves too, making even more of his skin visible. It’s cold, but he warms up quick enough between dancing and the heat of the club.

Somehow, Noya found the patience to sit down and sew about a million individual white sequins down every single strip as well, and permanently drench the thing in glitter. When the light hits him, he genuinely glows.

There is also the matter of shoes. While his old shitty converse were acceptable for waiting tables, out of sight and easy to move in, they are  _ not  _ acceptable for dancing. Poor Kenma spends nearly two hours with Noya in a nearby shoe shop, in the women’s section trying on high heels. The shop assistant hadn’t gone anywhere near them, but he’d felt ready to die the entire time.

Once he’s gotten through the mortification of buying them, he has to learn how to actually walk.

“I think we’re doing something wrong,” Hinata mumbles to himself as he stares at the boy, still sitting on the ground from where he had collapsed moments ago after not even taking a single step. “It can’t be  _ that _ hard.”

Tsukishima looks up from his phone. He’d come in early to shower – something about his roommate flooding their bathroom – and sits by Yamaguchi as they wait for the club to open, sharing a large order of sushi. “‘Can’t be that hard?’ Are you saying you  _ can’t  _ walk in heels?”

Hinata blinks over at him. “No.”

Tsukishima squints. “You’re not saying you can’t walk in heels?”

“No.”

“Are you infuriating on purpose?”

Hinata blinks again. “No.”

“Guter Gott.”  _ Good god. _

Yamaguchi sighs, walking over to the boy on the ground to take his hands and help him up to his feet again. “You walk in the heels or no, Hinata-kun?”

“No, I cannot.”

“Then maybe you no good teacher,” Yamauchi suggests gently. He catches the boy by the waist before he can topple again, leaves one hand there while the other holds Kenma’s left hand out in front of him. “You no stand alone?”

He shakes his head, flaps his wings uselessly both out of frustration and for balance.

“Maybe that’s what you're doing wrong, then,” Tsukishima offers. “You don’t learn to walk before you learn to stand. Just work on your stationary balance for now. In the meantime, why don’t we get someone in here who actually knows what the hell they’re doing? Where is Oikawa-san?”

“I go get him,” Yamaguchi offers. “You hold him, Tsukki?”

Tsukishima rolls his eyes practically back into his skull, but he stands up and approaches the two of them, placing his hands where Yamaguchi directs in order to maintain the boy’s balance. Hinata flops down on the bench with his chin in his hands.

“Maybe we should get you a pair of heels, Shorty,” Tsukishima teases, snickering at the way Hinata’s head shoots up immediately. “Maybe you’ll actually be taller than Noya for once.”

“Hey!!” Hinata shouts, jumping to his feet, “I’m already taller than Noya-san!”

“With his hair up or down?”

Hinata rushes forward, taking a dive at the older boy. He ducks out of the way as he laughs, trying to hide behind the boy – still teetering in heels – and half pushing him forward as though he’s a shield. Kenma loses what little balance he’d been able to maintain and crashes into Hinata, knocking them both to the floor just as Yamaguchi and Oikawa step in from the stage.

“Is this a bad time?” Oikawa asks mildly as he watches Kenma try to push himself up so he’s not crushing Hinata. He realizes with a shake of his head that he’s practically straddling the other boy, and almost throws himself to the side in an effort to free them from the compromising position. They scuffle around; Hinata rolls to one side and manages to push himself to his knees, the boy flaps his wings around uselessly as he tries to right himself as well.

Tsukishima is still standing off to the side, covering his mouth as he laughs. Yamaguchi is giggling quietly behind his wrist. Oikawa shakes his head, bypasses Hinata to grab Kenma’s hands and help him slowly to his feet again.

“Better?” he asks when everyone is standing upright. “Goodness, you children cause problems.”

Tsukishima narrows his eyes. “You’re only a year older than me –”

“Now,” Oikawa cuts in, smoothly ignoring him, “Freckle-ya tells me you’re having trouble balancing?”

He nods, trying not to move too much lest he shifts his weight too far and sends himself crashing back to the ground.

“You can’t even stand?”

He shakes his head no.

“All right. Think of it kind of like standing on your toes at first. It will help if you keep your wings out, to balance you.”

Tsukishima and Yamaguchi sit beside Hinata on the bench, settling in to watch the boy toddle around the locker room like a newborn deer until it’s time for all of them to go to work.

 

“His song starts in thirty seconds,” Tsukishima’s voice crackles from the walkie positioned on the corner of the vanity table.

Hinata swipes it up and chirps back, “Roger that!” with a ridiculously serious expression before considering the boy seated in front of him. “Whattaya think, Angel?” he asks. Most of the dancers have started calling him that, for obvious reasons. His menagerie of names has dwindled to nothing more than Angel and Kenma.

He looks at himself in the mirror, takes in the blond hair, white outfit and makeup, subtle shine of his pale skin thanks to plenty of oil and glitter, and flashes Hinata a thumbs up.

“Ten seconds.”

He stands, approaches the curtain to the stage, takes a deep breath and listens for his cue. He doesn’t go on right as the music starts, he has to wait for the intro to run its course. When the gentle guitar picks finish, he glides out onto the stage.

 

Lap dances continue to be both the best and worst thing Kenma has to experience. On the upside, he gets to be desired Up Close, see right in their eyes what he's doing to his customers, but that's also the bad part. He gets to be  _ up close and personal _ , in a way he’s really never willingly been before.

People aren't permitted to touch him unless he lets them. It’s a strict rule here, Ukai tells them almost every night that their safety and comfort is his top priority. The boy appreciates the sentiment, but the fact is it brings in much more money if he lets them.

(It's worth noting how long it's taken him to get here, how much he's  _ forced  _ himself to be okay with it, because with their hands gliding over his thighs and his chest and his wrists it brings forward all sorts of awful, locked away memories.)

But he feels… okay, tonight. Not exactly  _ good, _ but his dance went well, the place is full but not quite overcrowded, and he hasn’t noticed the man who has been staring nearly unblinking at him all night. He glanced at him once or twice, but truthfully his behavior wasn’t that odd. People have been ogling him his entire life for one reason or another, this man at first seems no different.

So Kenma glides around the floor, twisting and curling slowly in and out of reach of aggressively horny gay men. Akaashi is dancing now, so the boy moves along to the slow beat of his music, a faint smirk on his lips as he trails his fingertips down one man’s jaw line.

He approaches the man who has been staring at him with small steps, like he’s been taught. At first he tried to mimic the long, sweeping way Oikawa walked, but Hinata had explained to him that the two of them attracted a ‘different kind of customer’ than dancers like Oikawa and even Suga and Akaashi.

Size is everything.

The man greets him like he's been waiting. “Nice of you to make your way over,” he smiles. His teeth are white and straight. He looks to be in his mid-thirties. The boy thinks nothing of him. “Thought you’d keep me waitin’ all night.”

Kenma nudges his way between the man’s knees, turning his shoulders from side to side as he slowly lowers himself down to an obscene level before rising again, maintaining eye contact. He takes a breath in like he's about to say something, then just smiles coyly at him instead.

“How much for a dance, Angel?”

He holds up six fingers.

“Sixty?  _ Damn  _ that’s expensive.”

He flutters his wings a little by way of explanation. He's  _ part bird _ , he's a human being infused with avian DNA, it's gonna cost a hell of a lot of money for him to wiggle his hips in your direction.

“I suppose that's fair,” the man allows. He pulls out three twenties and tucks them into the string of Kenma’s thong, holding eye contact as he puts his hands on his hips and pulls him forward.

Kenma lands on his knees on the chair, legs braced on either side of the man’s thighs. With his wrists draped over the back of the chair, he drops his head close so he can see his own reflection in the man’s eyes; glassy, he's drunk.

Akaashi's song ends, begins to melt into something familiar and… European. British. Oikawa must be pestering Tsukishima up in his booth again. He can't understand the lyrics, but the beat is slow and punctuated, sensual. 

He rolls his hips in little circles just above the man's, backing up just slightly every time he tries to move forward. He starts to rotate in place, turning away from the man and moving forward enough so the wings he's displaying won't smack him in the face.

He's about halfway around, facing the stage when the man’s fingers grab at his hips. Mildly annoyed, he pushes them off – he's gonna be one of  _ those  _ guys – but they're back again instantly, pulling the boy down into his lap.

Kenma is about to stand up, push the man away for good and find a security guard to throw him out, but the man's fingers tighten to the point of bruising and then hot breath is hissing in his ear.

_ “Now now,” _ he croons, vowels dripping like water, like sticky beer, “No need to get hasty.” He hears a click, the slice of metal against metal, and then something cold and hard is pressing against his shoulder blade, right where his wings meet skin.

_ Knife _ .

He turns to stone in the man’s lap, doesn’t dare allow his body to inhale as he slowly retracts his hands, tries not to shake.

“Just keep dancing, hmm?” the man purrs.

What the hell is he  _ supposed _ to do?

He starts to move again, praying the man won’t notice, or at least won’t comment, on how he’s stiffer than a board. The man’s fingers return to his hips, trembling over his thighs and back and  _ dangerously  _ close to his crotch before moving away again. It’s been a long time since he’s had sex, since he’s been touched like this at all. He hasn’t missed it.

When they’re face to face again, the man holds up his hands, maintaining eye contact as he slips the knife into the sleeve of his jacket, point out. Kenma gets the message.  _ Just because it’s not in my hand does not mean you’re safe. _

The man reaches around so his hands are on Kenma’s bare ass, then yanks him down so their hips are flush together. Kenma keeps his face blank, but the man’s fingers are kneading his flesh and he’s back on a train at rush hour when he’s thirteen years old and he kind of wants to throw up.

One hand leaves his ass and some of the panic drains from his chest, only to well back up again when it grabs his wrist. For a horrifying moment, he’s afraid the guy is going to break it. He pushes away the thought, because of course that’s not his intention, but thinks he’d prefer a broken bone over the position he’s in right now. The man guides his hand down between them, then places it on his dick.

“C’mon baby,” he mutters.

Kenma shutters at the pet name.

“Make Daddy feel good, huh?”

He almost throws up in his mouth.

It hasn’t really been that long, in terms of years or even months, since he’s done anything sexual. But he feels like everything has changed so much – like  _ he’s  _ changed so much – that this feels more like regression than a threat or an attack. But what choice does he have? There’s still a knife concealed in the man’s sleeve.

As soon as his hand touches the bulge in his pants, the man moans obscenely and rocks his hips up, head falling back. Kenma can feel his face flushing in embarrassment and shame, but keeps his hand still and lets the man grind against it.

He tries to block out the feeling, tries to block out the music and the heat and the alcohol on the man’s breath. He stares and stares and stares until oblivion floods his vision.

(It’s a habit he picked up when he was just a child in the lab: Ignore it until it’s over, because sooner or later, one way or another, it  _ will  _ be over.)

Distantly, he feels the man’s hand bump against his, feels the vibration through the fabric as the zipper on his pants is pulled undone. His hand is forced through the gap, now only one layer separating his hand from this guy’s dick. He makes a mental note to slather his entire body in hand sanitizer when this is over, or maybe set himself on fire.

He’d been gazing blindly over the man’s shoulder for the duration of this dance-turned-nightmare, but his attention is grabbed by a flash of white hair. Bokuto is lounging against the edge of the stage, presumably waiting for the next dancer as he chats with someone at a table. He keeps glancing up at the boy, expression looking more and more concerned. He starts to take a step forward before hesitating, and the guy he’s talking to turns around as well, confused.

Before he can calmly beckon Bokuto over, the man he’s sitting on starts groping at his dick through the thong. Appalled and  _ definitely  _ close to vomiting now, his face twists into some mix between shock and horror, and then Bokuto is striding purposefully toward them. He squirms uncomfortably as the man’s mouth latches on his neck and starts to sloppily suck, breath speeding up as he starts to panic.

Bokuto’s hand slaps down on the man’s shoulder.

“Hey, hey, hey,” he says, much darker than his usual playful tone. “Are we having a problem over here, gentlemen?”

“No no,” the man says quickly, immediately releasing his hold on the boy’s crotch. One hand is still clearly on his ass, and his neck is covered in spit and starting to bruise.

“Mhm,” Bokuto hums disbelievingly. He looks over Kenma’s shoulder for a split second and beckons with his head, then his eyes are back on the man. “We have a _very_ strict hands off policy here at Tomcat.” He looks pointedly at the man’s hands, his unzipped pants, the boy’s neck. “Any violation of our rules will result in _immediate_ termination and removal from the premises.”

A gentle hand touches his shoulder, the boy nearly jumps out of his skin. But he turns to see Suga, dressed in sweatpants and a t-shirt, looking very out of place in the middle of the club. At the prompt of Suga’s gentle tugging, he slowly backs away from the man, relieved when he’s let go without resistance.

“In other words, you’re gettin’ thrown out,” Bokuto grins. He grabs the man’s arm and hauls him up, leading him toward the front. They disappear into the crowd before Kenma can see the knife fall from the man’s sleeve, before he can see Bokuto get well and truly angry, radio Ukai out of his office to take this guy’s thumb print and picture to ensure that he will never set foot in the building again.

Suga gently takes his hand, pulls him in the opposite direction. “Come on,” he says quietly, lips beside his ear to be heard over the music. “I think you’ve worked enough for tonight.” They slip through the door to the tunnel without issue, and Suga tells him to go shower. “I’ll get some clothes from your room, okay?”

He nods, scuttles into the pit and into a shower before anyone can say something to him. Kicking off his clothes, he doesn’t remember to get out of the way while the water heats up, so he lets out half of a yelp as he’s doused in cold spray.

He tries to lose himself in the task at hand. Focuses on picking up the soap, running it over his body, scrubbing his fingers through his hair.

Glitter pools in the drain and he wonders absently if that’s bad for the pipes. He lets the thought come to full focus as he feels his eyes start to burn with tears.  _ Think _ . Think logically about the pipes, would something like glitter be a problem, if it’s that tiny? Would it build up and clog something? Block something? Would there be enough water to let it drain?

His eyes are burning and his chest is shuddering, his wings come up instinctively to curl around his arms and block his face and torso.

Suga taps his knuckles against the face of the stall separator and Kenma jumps a foot in the air, an almost shriek tearing from his lips.

“Kenma?” The alarm in Suga’s voice makes his throat tight. He turns off the water and can only reach out to bat at the curtain before the instinct to curl in on himself becomes too powerful to ignore.

When Suga pushes the curtain back, Kenma is crouched on the ground. His knees are drawn tightly to his chest, locked in place by his arms, wings surrounding his body completely. He’s shaking with tears.

The older boy doesn’t say anything except to mumble a quiet exclamation in Chinese, then walks right into the soaked stall in his socks. He crouches in front of the boy, and still does not speak. Instead, he shakes open the towel in his hands, sets the clothes on his thighs, and reaches out with the towel to begin drying his hair.

He releases it when one of Kenma’s hands escapes his wings to grab it himself, and he rubs it over his face and head.

“Let’s go back to your room,” Suga finally murmurs.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> heather flowers represent loneliness. he basically feels like he's smothering in loneliness
> 
> if you were wonderin about all those APPS:  
> yaku and lev - neko atsume  
> suga - viridi (succulents)  
> daichi - zen koi  
> kageyama - doodle jump  
> noya and tanaka - fruit ninja  
> bokuto - pokemon go  
> akaashi - two dots  
> iwaizumi - sudoku  
> yama - pandora  
> tsukki - spotify  
> oikawa - snapchat  
> hinata - instagram
> 
> [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nyuo9-OjNNg) is the song that oikawa was playing while that final scene is happening


	7. Chasing a Dream

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> ENTER KUROO yall thirsty motherfuckers HERE HE IS

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hi oh my god i'm sorry this is a week late but like. this past week was so fucking rough and by the time i even remembered i was supposed to post the next chapter it was saturday and i was like 'fuck it i'll just wait till next tuesday' so. next chapter will be two weeks from now sorry

**Tohoku University**  
**March 2016**

He looks up from his kitchen table when someone knocks on the front door of his apartment. “Yeah, come in.” It’s Yamamoto who jumps over the threshold, a grin tugging at one side of his face. “Hey man,” he greets.

“Hey,” Yamamoto says back. “Listen, y’know how you have that friend that works at the strip club kinda near here? The cat place?”

He raises an eyebrow and puts down his pen, his homework effectively going on hold. “By ‘friend’ I’m assuming you mean the guy I knew in high school because we were both captains of our volleyball –”

“Yeah yeah, that guy,” Yamamoto cuts him off. “Listen, I heard they got this new dancer recently, right? A few months ago or something. And the guy I was talking to was like, drunk as hell so he wasn’t saying much, but I guess the kid is like, out of this world sexy, y’know?”

“Okay…?”

“Me and some guys are going tonight, you wanna come? And maybe… I don’t know… Getuspastthelineorsomething?”

He grins as Yamamoto spits out the last part. “So that’s what this is about, huh?” he teases, just to watch Yamamoto jump to defend himself.

“No! I mean, yes, but. Wait, I – I mean, we want along also cuz, y’know, you’re a hella cool guy and you’re fun to hang out with, but also it’s still cold after the sun goes down, so we don’t wanna wait –”

“Yeah, yeah,” he smiles, cutting the younger boy off, “I’ll go with you.”

“Thanks, Kuroo!”

 

To be honest, Kuroo Tetsurou is not usually one for clubs.

He certainly understands the pull, and always has a good time when he goes, it’s just not something he would suggest if he was looking for something to do. Call him a basic college sophomore, but he prefers house parties or something smaller, where he has a chance of knowing people there, and is at least guaranteed that they’ll all be around his age.

He doesn’t know what kind of crowd this place usually draws, but based on what Yamamoto’s told him it’s pretty mixed. He knows people who go to their school who come here fairly often, but he’s read local news stories about older men getting thrown out for one reason or another. Kuroo hopes it’s more people their age. Drunk middle aged men are not people he generally enjoys.

It’s worth it, though, when Bokuto sees him in line with three other guys and immediately waves them to the front. “Hey, hey, hey!!” he greets as he pulls Kuroo into a one armed hug, clapping him on the back with the other arm. “What’s goin’ on, man? I haven’t seen you since high school!”

Kuroo slaps his back in response before pulling away. “It’s good to see you, dude. I’m going to college near here actually. Tohoku.”

“That’s cool! I’ve been taking some time off – just wanna relax, y’know? Don’t know if I’m ever gonna go – But c’mon, I’ll get you in, no fuss.” Bokuto turns toward the door, beckoning the four of them to follow.

Kuroo has been to this area before – they have a Korean bakery his mother took him to all the time as a child, and the tattoo parlor he’s visited a few times – but he’s never been in this place. Again, not one for clubs. It’s nice, he supposes. He can see the appeal.

He and his group follow Bokuto to a booth; he slides in next to Yamamoto with the other two across from them. They’re two of Yamamoto’s friends, both his age. Yahaba Something and… his boyfriend. Kytoni? Kyoutani, if he remembers correctly. Yahaba seems cool but that guy freaks him out.

“I gotta go back to the door, but hey I’ll come talk to you in a bit, ‘kay?” Bokuto says, and he’s off before Kuroo can really answer.

“Your friend is crazy,” Yamamoto says as he looks over the drinks.

“He didn’t card us,” Yahaba points out.

“I know,” Yamamoto grins, “I like him.”

 

They chill out in the booth for a while. Yahaba pokes fun at his boyfriend while he grumbles back, Yamamoto whistles at pretty much everyone who walks by – especially their shy looking waiter with freckles and dark hair. Kuroo orders four drinks in the span of an hour, hardly gets buzzed.

After a while, Bokuto comes back. He trades stories with Kuroo while Yamamoto listens in none too discreetly, always eager to know everything even if he doesn’t know the people.

When Bokuto is in the middle of telling him about the apparent ‘sexual tension’ between the bartender’s apprentice and one of the waiters/backup dancers, the atmosphere starts changing. The music slows down, the lights don’t brighten so much as desaturate, until everything is bathed in a soft white glow, clearly directing attention to the stage.

“Oh! I gotta go, dances are starting,” Bokuto explains in a rush, pushing his hair up to fix the spikes, smoothing out his eyebrows. He stops moving long enough to give Kuroo a fist bump, then darts over to assume his place to the side of the stage, face settling into a serious glare and arms flexed over his chest. Kuroo is shocked how quickly he can make himself look intimidating.

Music begins to flutter through the air, gentler than Kuroo would expect to hear in a strip club. Soft guitar picks ripple across the club for about fifteen seconds without vocals, then a high pitched woman’s voice begins.

The lyrics are in English, a language he’s only familiar with, but even buzzed he can understand enough to get the feeling it’s inappropriate. As soon as the words begin, a short boy emerges from the curtain, dressed all in white with matching eyeliner and – R.I.P – white high heels to boot. Kuroo’s mouth drops open as those four drinks seem to hit him at once.

The boy sidles out, taking his sweet time as he approaches the pole closest to him. When he gets there, he hooks one leg around it and pulls the rest of his body forward, wrapping an arm around it as well and sinking down.

“This is the new dancer I was talking about,” Yamamoto mutters from his side. Kuroo barely hears him.

The boy rises back to his full height, and something appears to flutter behind him for a moment before he begins slowly extending  _ wings. _

Yamamoto elbows him in the ribs. “Man, you’re drooling.”

The crowd whistles and cheers as the boy saunters down the center of the stage, heels clicking to the beat of the song.

_ Yayo. _

_ Yes, you. _

_ Yayo. _

The boy reaches the end of the stage, grabbing the pole with one hand and swinging around it. When his back faces Kuroo, he’s hit with a full view of the wings and holy shit they’re fucking  _ real. _ If he wasn’t already sitting he’d probably collapse.

The music continues, the woman’s voice so high pitched her words don’t end the way they should, as they boy lifts himself up, lowers himself obscenely to the ground, lies on his stomach and lifts his hips and closes his eyes in a way that Kuroo swears has half the audience hard. Even Kyoutani’s eyebrows have shot up into his bleached hairline, Yahaba’s eyes are as wide as dinner plates.

By the time the dance ends, all four of them are flushed and embarrassed – Yamamoto even excuses himself to the bathroom for a few minutes to calm down.

_ “Well,” _ Kyoutani grunts after he downs the rest of his drink. “Can’t say I’ve ever seen anything like  _ that  _ before.”

“Impressive,” Kuroo agrees in a daze. He’s busy replaying the performance in his mind. Despite the almost overwhelming sexiness of the dance, Kuroo couldn’t help but find the boy genuinely attractive. He wonders what he looks like dressed in normal clothes, if he goes to school – how  _ old  _ is he? He knows how stupid it is to want to get to know a stripper, but something about that kid felt  _ right, _ like he  _ should  _ be getting to know him.

“You still in there, man?” Yamamoto asks when he returns, waving a hand in front of Kuroo’s eyes.

He blinks, looks up. “Oh, yeah, yeah. Sorry.”

“Told you that dude was fucking hot. Was I right or was I right?”

“You were…  _ Jogeumdo, _ damn, you were right.”

Yamamoto motions for him to get out of the booth so he can get back in, and Kuroo takes a second to comply. “Shit man, are you that messed up over it?” Yamamoto teases as he takes his seat.

Kuroo collects himself enough to spit back, “I’m sorry, where were you just now?” and Yahaba ‘Oooooh’s behind the cover of his hand.

“Hey, I think he’s coming out for private dances,” Kyoutani says, pointing toward the curtain at the other end of the stage. The curtain is just falling back into place, as the boy slowly sits down on the edge of the stage and swings his legs over, hopping to the ground and gliding around the floor.

He makes eye contact with Kuroo from across the room, and a smirk dances over his lips. Kuroo’s breath leaves him.

“Oh woah, is he coming over?”

The alcohol has reached his brain since he stood up, he’s going to  _ pass out. _

The boy slowly approaches them, twirling and smirking and flirting with everyone he passes along the way. By the time he gets to their table, Yahaba is giggling nervously and Kyoutani is fidgeting. Yamamoto is chugging his drink.

Clearly enjoying how flustered he’s making all of them, the boy wastes no time. He slides right into the booth, luckily far enough back from the table that he can comfortably seat himself in Kuroo’s lap. Yahaba is looking away and covering his mouth, shaking as he cracks up.

The boy begins rolling his hips, draping his arms over Kuroo’s shoulders and leaning in close, smirking at him, wings fluttering out and to the sides. Kuroo stares into gold eyes, mesmerized by the glitter on his cheekbones and the gentle swoop of his eyeliner. He doesn't realize he's lifted his hands to the boy's hips until they're slapped away, and Yamamoto barks a short laugh.

“Don't you know anything, man? No touching.”

The boy tips his head at Yamamoto without looking at him, as if agreeing. Kuroo drops his hands back to his sides.

“Kentarou, let's go dance,” Yahaba blurts out. He places his hands on Kyoutani’s shoulders and bodily forces him out of the booth. “Care to join us, Yamamoto?”

“Right behind you,” he says quickly, and without hesitating he’s pushing up out of his seat, jumping on the table and hopping to the floor. The boy in Kuroo’s lap stares after him, his expression a mix of disbelief and annoyance.

But he shakes his head minutely and turns his full attention back to Kuroo, smirking at him as he begins a series of body rolls. Kuroo’s probably blushing like crazy by now, but how can he not be when there’s an  _ angel  _ on top of him, smirking like he knows  _ exactly  _ what he’s doing to Kuroo. And he probably does. He does this every night.

The boy leans forward, and for a moment Kuroo thinks they’re going to kiss, but his head is angled wrong and it ends up buried in the junction of his neck and shoulder. Hot breath puffs over his collarbone, and the boy switches from full body rolls to undulating his hips. Kuroo is guaranteed to lose his mind if he sits here in silence any longer.

“What’s your name?” he gasps out, hands twitching by his sides.

Cool lips soothe the burning of his neck and Kuroo jolts slightly. He thinks the boy is kissing him for a second, ignoring his question, but then he realizes he was mouthing a word, and the wings on his back are slowly expanding.

_ Angel. _

_ “Ttong.” Shit. _

 

**May 2016**

After that, it’s just a question of how soon Kuroo can get Yamamoto to go back to the club with him.

“Man, what’s your deal?” Yamamoto asks after his third consecutive Friday night asking. “I know the kid was hot, but like, have a little self-control.”

“I have plenty of self-control,” Kuroo grumbles. “I am always kind.”

“I didn’t say you weren’t,” Yamamoto says, raising his hands placatingly. “But I'm fuckin’  _ broke  _ man, I can’t just go to strip clubs all willy nilly, y’know?” He slumps forward against his desk, glaring at Kuroo with the one eye not blocked by his arm. “I  _ wish  _ I could.”

Kuroo, in turn, flops on the spare bed in the middle of the room, groaning. He’s lucky, he’s had the same job at the framing shop down the street from campus since he was a freshman. His only real hobbies are partying and sleeping, both of which are free. He wouldn’t say he’s  _ rolling  _ in cash, obviously, since he’s paying for college, but he’s got a pretty good deal of spending money to get by on.

“It’ll be on me,” he tries in a last ditch effort to persuade Yamamoto.

The younger boy stares at him. “You’re a desperate motherfucker.”

“Are you coming or not?”

 

The club is the same as Kuroo remembers it, really. Maybe things are a bit louder, but that’s probably just his memory being crap. Bokuto greets them enthusiastically at the door again, says he’s got a ‘prime spot’ reserved, then he winks so much it looks like he’s having a seizure. Kuroo follows him hesitantly after that, but Yamamoto bounds right ahead. “You did this,” he reminds Kuroo on the way.

Bokuto, the bastard, seats them right in front of the entrance to the stage, giving them a full view of anyone coming in or out. Kuroo drops his face in his hands in embarrassment, shaking his head in mild disbelief. “I did this,” he groans.

Yamamoto eagerly sits forward and mimes snapping pictures at nothing. “You certainly did,” he agrees happily. Then he starts rattling off in that way he does when he gets excited, bouncing in his seat like an over-excited child. “Oh, dude we can see  _ everything. _ This is gonna be so good. This shit is class! I love this club. Have I mentioned that I like your friend? Cuz I really, really do.”

“Try not to get too excited this time,” Kuroo jabs back, and he half wishes he had Yahaba here to appreciate his taunting.

“Hey, you’re just jealous cuz you want that winged kid all to yourself.”

Kuroo places a hand on his chest.  _ “Jealous?” _ he intones, putting more mock disbelief in the word than strictly necessary. “I believe  _ I’m  _ the one who got the dance. For free, I might add. How was dancing with the pretty boy and his dog, anyway?”

Yamamoto lets his head sag back on his neck and groans in annoyance. “Okay, okay, truce. Jeez.” He sulks in his seat until a waiter comes over, this time a very tall boy with silver hair. He immediately strikes up a conversation with Yamamoto, and it’s worth waiting an extra three or four minutes for his drink when it puts the younger boy in a much better mood for the rest of the night.

“Making friends?” Kuroo asks as the waiter walks away.

Yamamoto doesn’t pick up on the teasing lilt. “He seemed cool, didn’t he?”

“Maybe the waiters here give dances too.”

He hits Kuroo on the arm.

Before they can escalate into an argument in the middle (off to the side) of the club, the lights begin to desaturation as they had before. They fade to white, and Kuroo’s eyes become fixed on the curtain to the stage. The same song is playing, if memory serves him, and he watches as the boy slips out from behind the curtain.

He’s even more breathtaking, somehow.

Kuroo takes a moment to rake his eyes over the outfit, but it’s the same, he’s sure. Same sparkly top, same snow white thong, same  _ high heels  _ and cheekbone glitter and eyeliner.

It’s the boy himself, Kuroo realizes after a minute. It’s not that he was sickly skinny the last time Kuroo saw him, but he was wiry and defined in a way that didn’t look entirely healthy. (And he had no idea that even that was a massive improvement to what he had been.) But he looks healthier, more color in his skin and a little bit of meat on his bones.

“Man, you’re  _ drooling.” _

 

He waits for the boy to come out for private dances.

Instead of waiting to get caged in, Yamamoto excuses himself beforehand to go dance, mumbling something about a pretty girl before he books it into the crowd.

When the boy comes to the edge of the stage to hop down, his eyes find Kuroo immediately. How could they not, when he’s the first table by the curtain? He grins, doesn’t even bother acknowledging the rest of the floor as he goes right up to Kuroo.

The boy adopts a look of pointed confusion, and offhandedly sticks his index finger up, twirling it loosely around in the air like he doesn’t realize he’s doing it.

_ Alone? _

Kuroo startles, pulls back a bit in surprise even as the boy slides warm into his lap. “Was that sign language?” he asks. “Did you just sign something?”

The boy mirrors his startled look, but he nods.

_ “Ttong. _ Wow.” He barks out a short laugh. What is he  _ doing? _ “No, I’m not alone,” he finally answers, “My friend is…” Kuroo looks out over the dance floor, then lets out another disbelieving laugh. “Well, he’s gone now.” He focuses back on the boy still  _ straddling his lap, _ but tries to ignore that. “You know sign language?”

The boy points to himself, then makes a fist with his right hand, thumb on the side of his fingers instead of over them. He presses the fist to his lips, the heel of his hand over his chin.

_ I’m mute. _

“Oh.  _ Oh. _ Well.” He cracks a smile, just barely resists making a dad joke. “I’m Kuroo,” he manages to push ahead, “Kuroo Tetsurou.”

The angel makes a hand like he’s going to point at something, then drags his index finger across his forehead.

_ Black. Kuro. _

Kuroo laughs agreeably. “Yeah, okay. What about you, huh?” He puts his fingertips on his shoulders before rotating his hands so they’re pointing out, wrists by his shoulders like he’s a little kid pretending to have wings.

_ Angel. _

The boy smiles widely, nods.

“Do you know a lot of sign language?” Kuroo asks.

As he shakes his head  _ no,  _ Kuroo’s waiter walks past. “You’re not being paid to talk, Angel-san,” he reminds gently. The boy’s back stiffens and he glares after the waiter, who had barely slowed down to clear away Kuroo’s empty glass.

But Kuroo just smiles. “Will you get in trouble for not working? I’ll still pay you even if I don’t get a dance.”

The boy shakes his head, not having it, and begins to roll his hips to the beat of the music.

“Or, you could still dance, I won’t object,” he gasps.

 

**April 2016**

Kuroo has visited the angel at the club four times now.

Yamamoto hasn’t come with him since the second time, but he got Yahaba and Kyoutani to come the fourth time, since he decided he definitely didn’t like sitting in a strip club alone. It made him feel like some sad, lonely old man, and the boy teased him for having no friends, since Yamamoto had disappeared on him the second time.

The fourth time, he leaves with a new contact in his phone and a promise to text and meet somewhere. As it turned out, the boy  _ doesn’t  _ know a lot of sign language, despite it seeming to be his primary method of communication. Lucky him, Kuroo has been taking it since high school. Despite it being his third language – after Japanese and Korean, taught to him by his parents – he feels he’s good enough to teach it.

They meet at a flower shop the boy suggested.

He’s sitting behind the counter when Kuroo walks in, pen moving above a pad of paper as the shopkeeper's daughter waters a pot of yellow chrysanthemums. She’s cute – blonde hair with a little braid in the side, cat stockings –  and he nods at her before heading to the counter where the boy is sitting.

With his head propped up in his left hand, Kuroo’s eyes catch on the tattoo that he’s seen each time he visited, but was never able to identify in the low light of the club. They’re birds. Kind of ironic, he thinks.

They’re standing on opposite sides of the counter. The angel behind it, as though he works there, Kuroo in front of it. He wonders if he’ll ever be more than just a customer.

The boy is sketching a group of tiny flowers in purple pen.

“What kind are those?” Kuroo asks softly instead of greeting him.

The boy doesn’t look up, but stops drawing to write  _ Lilac _ in the corner of the page.

“They’re very pretty.”

He doesn’t let go of the pen, but finally looks up to sign  _ thank you  _ at Kuroo.

Free of the smoke and lights, the boy looks different. He’s not wearing any makeup, as expected, but he isn’t any less striking. Sharp, focused eyes are framed by dark eyelashes that match his undyed roots. The lack of glitter on his cheekbones only serves to soften his face, making him look a lot younger than he does in the club, and not for the first time Kuroo finds himself wondering how old he is.

“Would you like to go get coffee?” Kuroo asks as the boy flips the notebook closed and rummages around by his feet. He looks up for a moment to nod and smile lightly, then comes around from behind the counter.

He looks very nice, Kuroo decides immediately, probably dressed up for the occasion but still casual. His shirt is sheer, billowy white, high slit sides revealing just a hint of his waist. Larger slits are visible in the back, his wings resting crossed over each other.

Charcoal denim shorts, ripped, and black Nikes with fuschia logos complete the look, along with a small bracelet on his wrist. It looks like a simple black cord, braided tightly maybe, with three groups of three silver square beads set at an angle.

“I like your bracelet,” Kuroo says to distract himself from the way the boy’s shirt rides up to reveal more of his skin as he picks up the bag and hangs it over one shoulder. It shouldn’t get him bothered like it is. He’s seen him practically naked after all.

The boy signs thank you again, but lacks the words and gestures to explain where he got it. Instead, he taps his nails against the counter – they’re painted white, he finally notices – causing the girl to turn around. They wave goodbye to each other before Kuroo leads him out of the shop.

“So,” he says as they walk toward where he hopes the coffee shop in this area is, “Do you have something I can call you other than Angel?”

The boy hesitates, thinking, and Kuroo assumes he’s simply looking at a stripper, trying to gauge whether this customer is trustworthy enough to tell his name to. He can’t begin to imagine the complications surrounding this question he’s faced his entire life.

The boy lifts his hand and haltingly finger spells K-E-N-M-A.

“Kenma,” he tries, slowly. He likes the soft way it sounds.

Kuroo has never seen the sun enter someone’s soul until now.

 

They get coffee a few blocks away, at a little place with fairy lights around the windows and plants growing in things not meant to hold plants. Cats sit by the entrance on both sides, darting in and out and nearly tripping people when they open the door.

Kenma picks a table with an abundance of Swedish ivy growing out of an old copper teapot, then scribbles his order on a slip of paper and hands it to Kuroo.

The girl behind the counter smiles brightly at him, even though he heard her use the exact same greeting on the four people ahead of him, but he doesn’t mind. He gets their coffees and returns to Kenma, who is sketching the teapot and leaves spilling out of it with a pencil.

“You like drawing quite a bit, don’t you?” Kuroo chuckles as he sets down the tray in his hands. Two coffees, a croissant for him, and a few sticks of dango for Kenma.

The boy stops and stares at his paper, like that’s never occurred to him before. Finally he looks up, mouths the word  _ yes  _ with a single nod of his head. He looks confused.

Kuroo chuckles. “What, did you just never realize? It takes a lot of practice for it to be that effortless, I’m pretty sure.”

He doesn’t seem to know how to answer, and after a moment just shakes his head, still staring at the drawing in front of him.

“Well, if it means anything to you, you’re a magnificent drawer.”

Kenma blushes and fidgets his wings, signs  _ thank you  _ for the hundred millionth time.

Kuroo smiles. For a few minutes, they’re suspended. The two sit in a bubble, tasting of coffee, sounding of pencil scratching and soft music from the speakers. When Kenma is finished drawing, he scribbles the date down in the corner, along with a little passage that Kuroo can’t read from his angle, then closes the book and looks up expectantly.

“Want to get started?” Kuroo asks, to which he gets a nod. “All right, so you know the alphabet, yes?”

He makes a fist and tilts his wrist forward once, like he’s knocking on a door.  _ Yes. _

“And I know you know the sign for ‘thank you,’” he teases.

Kenma gives him a withering look.  _ Yes. _

“Do you know… numbers?”

His face switches from scathing to exasperated, and he starts counting on his fingers.

Kuroo laughs. “Okay, yes, but do you know up to like the twenties, thirties, hundreds? The proper… handshapes, and all that?”

_ Yes. _

He sits back and thinks for a few moments. Where to  _ start? _ Where did  _ he  _ start? He’s been taking sign language since, God, his first year of high school. “Hold on a moment,” he mumbles, digging his phone out of his pocket. He’s kept track of his notes, hopefully dating all the way back to when he was a teenager.

(It takes a bit of digging through old folders and the trash, but he finds his notes from the very first unit.)

“We’ll start with greetings.”

 

* * *

 

**May 2016**

As far as Kenma is concerned, (he is officially Kenma now, no more Tori, no more Neko-ya, just the occasional Angel when he's working) Kuroo Tetsurou is the one who’s the angel, not him.

The sight of him in the club that first night had been enough to set the edges of him on fire, just a quiet, smoldering burn that insisted he  _ had  _ to get close. If it hadn’t been for his friend with the blond mohawk (who  _ stood  _ on the  _ table, _ Kenma could not believe the nerve) he would have been happy to let Kuroo touch him however he wanted.

He’s like no one Kenma has ever seen, but everything he’s been looking for all at once. His hair is black as night, impossibly black, most likely dyed, and soft to the touch, as he found out eventually. His eyes are like liquid amber captivating Kenma instead of bugs and it’s made worse by his damn smirk and the large black studs in his ears and  _ tattoos _ , did he mention Kuroo has tattoos?

Kenma has never seen them fully. So much of Kuroo remains a mystery, even on the surface, but spikes of the end peek out around of the right side of his neck depending on the shirt he’s wearing, as well as triangles beneath the sleeve. There’s another one on his forearm, some kind of pretty dot and line pattern in a circle, divided by a strip of negative space in the middle. Kenma likes to run his fingers over it because it makes Kuroo squirm.

Despite his generally reckless appearance, Kuroo is brilliant. He’s going to college nearby – Kenma isn’t sure what for, but he’s going – and never mentions it being particularly stressful or demanding. Anything that happens he handles with ease, from money to people to when Kenma gets stuck on a sign.

Sign language.

His  _ third  _ language.

He’s been speaking Japanese and Korean all his life, since his mother is from Korea, and he and Oikawa often have drawn out conversations about topics that remain a mystery to Kenma, in their vowel filled, springy language. Kuroo has also mentioned knowing a lot of English vocabulary, but their batshit grammar goes right over his head.

They’re sitting outside today, safe in the warm sunlight, on a bench off to the side of the road so Kenma can sketch the cherry blossoms. Kuroo is leaned back, arms behind his head as he soaks in the sun. He looks so content, like he’s found inner peace on this bench in front of a magazine shop.

Kenma stops drawing the blossoms and just looks at him for a moment, taking in his expression, the way the sunlight bends on his skin. He’s beautiful, Kenma thinks for the hundredth time. Without thinking, he starts to sketch him.

Feeling Kuroo’s eyes on him a few minutes later, he stops. He sneaks a glance through his hair, sees the expression on Kuroo's face is practically unchanged. “You're really wonderful, y’know?” he says softly.

Kenma blushes and ducks his head, wings curling subconsciously around his arms as he goes back to his messy sketch and starts to clean it up. Kuroo’s hair is a nightmare to draw, he has to tilt both of their heads in several different directions before his sketch looks suitable.

“How long have you been drawing?” Kuroo asks as he resumes his previous position, presumably to make fixing the sketch easier on Kenma. He keeps his eyes open, trained on the shorter boy so he’ll be able to see if he says something.

Kenma puts down his pencil and his hands twitch like he’s going to start signing, but then he stops to think. He’s always drawn, he thinks. Not in the lab, definitely, but he doesn’t like to think of that as part of his life. Just a mishap, something that happened a lifetime ago to someone else that he only happens to know about.

But ever since he got out, it feels like drawing has just been something he’s always done. Sketching bugs in the dirt, drawing on newspapers, sticky notes, anything he could get his hands on. When he started working at the club and had money to spare, he and Shouyou would tag along with Noya when he went to art supply stores, and it seemed only natural to get a sketchpad and a pack of pencils for himself.

Eventually he shrugs, counts back in his head and realizes with a start that it's been eight years since he escaped the lab with those two half-American kids. He wonders if he's older now than they were then.

Kuroo is still waiting for an answer, so he raises his right hand with his fingers spread, save for his middle finger held down by his thumb, then balls his hands into sideways fists, like he's going to fist bump himself but with his knuckles facing out. He circles them around each other once before placing one fist on top of the other.

_ Eight years. _

“Wow. And you’re… How old are you?” Kuroo asks.

Kenma realizes with a start that Kuroo has never bothered to ask about his age, despite having known each other for about four months now. He hesitates, hit all at once with how painfully young he is. Squashing it down, he holds up his right hand again, palm facing his chest with his fingers open, this time holding his ring finger down with his thumb. He twists his hand by the wrist toward Kuroo twice, then points to himself.

_ Seventeen. _

He doesn’t know how to formally ask it back, so he just furrows his eyebrows and points at Kuroo as if to say,  _ And you? _

“I’m twenty. I’m a sophomore in college.”

Kenma nods, feeling a little embarrassed. Kuroo’s an  _ adult. _ He’s well into college, with a job and good grades and probably a whole lot of life experience under his belt. And Kenma… he’s just a kid. A kid raised in isolation, at that. Any traces of baby fat are long gone, and any innocence he had was smashed to pieces a decade ago. He’s aged well beyond his years, but he’s still… just a child.

He goes back to drawing, redefining some of the previously light lines. This at least, is something he knows. The tips of Kuroo’s tattoo are visible, creeping up the base of his neck.

“Do you go to school?” Kuroo asks after a few minutes of silence. Combined with the sunlight, the air around them has become heavy. He doesn’t clarify if he means high school or college, but the answer is the same either way.

Kenma shakes his head.

“Already graduated?”

He shakes his head again.

“Have you… never been to school?”

Kenma lifts his left hand, last two fingers curled in, with his thumb, pointer, and middle finger pointing straight out. He closes the tips of his fingers together without looking up from his drawing.

_ No. _

It used to bother him. He’s over it.

“But…” Kuroo looks more curious than he does confused. “You can read and write. You know how money works.”

Kenma raises his chin as he looks up at Kuroo, feathers bristling, a little offended.

He points to himself, then makes a fist with his thumb out, swipes it along the underside of his chin and stops it a few centimeters in front of his neck. He makes a peace sign with his hand and touches his knuckles to his forehead like one would with the Loser gesture. He automatically twists his face in mild annoyance.

_ I’m not stupid. _

Kuroo laughs a bit. “Right, I’m sorry. That was pretty rude of me, huh?”

Kenma nods with a soft glare, turning back to his notebook.

“How’d you learn, then, if you never went to school?”

He hesitates, thinks about the people who taught him what he knows. Some of them were good: The flower shop owner’s daughter, the homeless deaf girl, Oikawa and Hinata and Noya. Some of them were actual life savers: Suga, the American boy from the lab. And some of them were just… There. The intern from his childhood, the only person in the lab to show him any kindness. Even after he was replaced, he helped Kenma over and over for years to come.

There’s no way he can tell Kuroo about his life before they met. No way to tell him about the experimentation, the abuse, the assault and the suffering. Not yet anyway.

He shakes his head.

 

**June 2016**

_ He’s running. _

_ Behind him is a large building, all glass and steel and shining in the sun. Cars stretch in every direction, too tall for him to see over but at every break he can see them lining the pavement, on and on and – _

_ He knows without looking that his feet are bare, but he can’t feel the asphalt bite into his skin, can’t feel the wind on his legs or in his hair like he knows he should be able to. _

_ Why do his wings feel so small? _

_ He doesn’t dwell on it. _

_ One person runs on either side of him. He can’t see them, but he knows that they’re familiar. That he’s supposed to stay with them. _

_ Far ahead of them are trees, stiff as if photographed. The wind is blowing, though he still can’t feel it, but the leaves and branches don’t sway. Huge trucks rumble behind him. The trees are safe, he knows. He’s always safe in the trees, he just has to  _ get there _ but no matter how hard he runs they never seem to get any closer. _

_ He can feel himself starting to get tired, even though he can’t feel his heart beating harder or his breathing getting shallower or his legs starting to burn. He’s slowing down. But the people he’s with press on tirelessly, sprinting at full speed. _

_ Behind him, the huge trucks are getting closer, and he can hear shouting. _

_ He’s running in slow motion. His strides become longer, more like he’s leaping than running. He tries using his hands to push off as well, so he’s running like a four-legged animal, sprinting like a dog. It doesn’t strike him as odd. He just has to get to the trees. He even flaps his wings. _

_ The people beside him pull ahead, and he sees two black hoodies and a head of blonde hair, far above him. They shouldn’t be  _ that  _ tall, but his perspective is jumping all over the place. The rumbling of the trucks gets ever closer, and then time seems to skip and they’re at the tree line, and the two people he’s running with disappear. _

_ There are large hands on the boy’s sides, pulling him away, and he tries to scream in pain as his wings are crushed at weird angles – _

He jerks awake as if electrified.

He’s lying on his back on Kuroo’s couch, wings around him like a cocoon, back propped against the arm of the couch. The credits of a movie play on the old TV that sits on the rug. Late afternoon sunlight slants through the big windows, missing his face but warming the tops of his bare thighs. His feet are in Kuroo’s lap, and judging by the way Kuroo is now doubled over clutching his stomach, Kenma assumes he kicked him in the process of waking up.

He makes a fist with his right hand, thumb on the side of his fingers instead of on top of them, facing his chest. He circles it around the center of his chest twice in a clockwise direction, clenching his teeth.

_ Sorry. _

Kuroo only catches the tail end of the sign, but it’s enough to discern the meaning and he waves his hand in dismissal. “S’okay, man.” He coughs. “Are you okay?”

Kenma nods once, despite the adrenaline still draining from his limbs.

 

**July 2016**

“Kenma-san, your boyfriend is here,” Lev says as he enters the pit.

Kenma whips his head around to glare at Lev. It’s not that he particularly dislikes the kid, it’s just that if he had to choose a least favorite co-worker it would definitely be him.

He throws down the makeup remover in his hand and curls his fingers into a fist, dragging his index finger across his forehead. From there he swaps his index finger and thumb to make a thumbs up, dragging it under his chin and almost pointing it straight at Lev by the end with the force.

He almost forgets to point to his own chest before whipping his hand back up to his forehead, pinching the air and moving his hand forward as if pinching the brim of a baseball hat. His hand falls down to meet his left one, both pointer fingers extended to make an X over each other. He hooks them together once, then quickly flips his hands over and does it again, shaking his head the whole time partially out of mild anger and partially to further negate the sentence.

_ He is  _ not  _ my boyfriend. _

The signs, of course, are all lost on Lev, who only picks up the adamant head shaking.

“Don’t make fun of him,” Yaku reprimands from the other side of the room.

“I wasn’t making fun of him!” Lev protests, turning around to face Yaku. “I thought he was really dating that guy…”

“Just because they hang out a lot doesn’t mean they’re dating, Lev.”

Kenma leaves them to argue, picking the makeup remover wipe back up and continuing to wipe at his eyes. It’s quarter to three in the morning, meaning his shift is pretty much over.

It’s a Sunday (technically Monday), but Kuroo doesn’t have class on Mondays and Kenma doesn’t have work, so he told him two hours ago that he would be more than happy to meet him after his shift, and that Kenma was welcome to stay the night.

He did this kind of thing a lot; staying over.

It started by accident. They had spent an entire Tuesday walking around the city, Kenma dragging Kuroo into shops to look at clothes and earrings and pastries until he was about to pass out standing up. Kuroo had invited him back to his apartment on campus, as they’d done plenty of times, and they’d played video games for a little while.

Eventually, Kuroo had regretfully informed him that he had class at four, then was scheduled to work on a group project, but Kenma was welcome to stay and take a nap, he’d be back by eight or so. He told him to help himself to anything in the kitchen for dinner, then left.

Kenma had curled up in Kuroo’s bed and slept until the next morning. Seeing him wrapped up in blankets, a small smile on his face, Kuroo didn’t have the heart to wake him.

(His excuse later was that this part of the city was way too unsafe to be walking around alone at night, for either of them.)

After that, it became a fairly common occurrence, and now Kenma is spending at least a few nights a week at Kuroo’s apartment.

But he isn’t… they aren’t… He means, he  _ is, _ but… Kuroo isn’t his boyfriend. Right? Kenma isn’t even sure he really  _ likes  _ him, at least like that. He’s never really liked anyone before, except maybe a minor childhood infatuation with Suga, but that was probably more gratefulness for keeping him alive. He’s found people attractive before, but…

Kenma stares at himself in the mirror, eyes a bit wide. Is Kuroo his boyfriend? They never kiss, very rarely even hold hands, but Kuroo usually shares the bed with him when he stays the night, even though Kenma almost always goes to bed and wakes up later. They hang out, but are they really  _ dates? _

_ Is _ Kuroo his boyfriend? How could he be, how could he like Kenma at all when Kuroo is air and soft sunlight and Kenma… Kenma is nothing but rotted flesh and a tight throat and hairpin bones –

“Look, see, you threw him into a crisis,” Yaku scolds.

Reality slams back into place as the two of them turn to look at him, and he hastily returns to wiping off his eyeliner. He throws the wipe in the trash with a smudge of ink still in the corner of his eye, but he doesn’t care anymore.

He quickly holds his left hand up to his chest, fingers together and palm flat toward the ground. He places his right hand in the same position, but touching his fingers to his lips, before moving it down to curve over the back of his left hand.

_ Goodnight. _

He runs out of the room as he signs it, wings fluttering behind him, but it’s not like either of them will understand anyway.

No one is in the tunnel, so Kenma quickly ducks into his room to grab the bag he packed earlier: pajamas, clothes for tomorrow, phone charger, comb, and wallet. He double checks before running back out into the main area of the club.

It’s practically empty by now. One booth has some kids in it: a boy with blue hair like Kageyama’s, a girl with bright pink hair, and a boy with black hair. He thinks they’re Tsukishima’s friends, Hinata has warned him that they’re polite enough but a little scary. He doesn’t get too close, heading in the opposite direction to where Kuroo is sitting at the bar beside an empty glass and chatting away with Oikawa. He tugs gently on Kuroo’s sleeve to get his attention when he gets close enough. He recognizes their words as Korean.

Kuroo turns to look at him with a broad smile, eyes lighting up despite the ever-present lines of exhaustion around them, deeper now that it’s the middle of the night. Kuroo can play it off all he wants, but college can’t be easy  _ all _ the time. Kenma is glad they’ll be able to sleep in tomorrow. Well, Kuroo will be able to sleep in, Kenma sleeps until at least noon every day.

“Hey there, Angel,” Kuroo smiles, slipping easily back into Japanese. He still calls him that sometimes, usually in or around the club. It’s become a sort of joke between them.

Kenma waves once, then makes a motion like he’s tugging cat whiskers on his cheek.

_ Hey, Kitty. _

“You ready to go?” Kuroo asks, sliding off his stool. Kenma nods, and Kuroo digs out his wallet to pay for his drink. “Thanks, Iwaizumi. Jal-ja-yo, Oikawa.”  _ Goodnight. _

“No problem. See you guys later.”

“Jal-ja~” _ Goodnight. _

Kuroo smiles at him again as Kenma hoists his bag onto one shoulder. He wishes he could get a normal backpack and wear it on both shoulders, but he’s got two good sized wings in the way that kind of prevent that. So he settles for tote bags, plain until he made the mistake of leaving one in the pit. Noya got his hands on it, so now a large golden dragon curls around a yellow gem in the center.

As they enter the cool night air, Kuroo shoves his hands in his pockets and looks down at the younger boy. “How was work?” he asks, “Anything interesting happen?”

Kenma shakes his head automatically, then hesitates.  _ Did _ anything happen during work? No, but he thinks about what Lev said while he was getting ready to leave. He points to Kuroo and furrows his eyebrows, then points to himself. He brings his hand up to pinch at that invisible baseball hat again, moving it down to pinch his index fingers together in an X.

_ Are you my boyfriend? _

Kuroo's eyes widen as he reads his hands. “Am I – Wow. Uh,” he chuckles nervously and rubs the back of his neck. “Not presently, no. Why?”

Kenma shrugs, looking away.

Kuroo rubs the back of his neck. “Did you… think I was?”

He shrugs again, wings ruffling in mild embarrassment as he presses all of his fingertips together against his forehead before twisting his wrist and moving his hand away, opening his fingers wide.

_ I didn't know. _

“Do you… want me to be?” Kuroo asks softly.

Kenma blushes instantly. In all honesty, he's not entirely sure what boyfriends  _ do. _ He knows they often live together, as Oikawa and Iwaizumi do, and Suga and Daichi. He knows that Daichi and Iwaizumi get this soft look in their eyes when they look at their boyfriends, that Bokuto absolutely lights up when Akaashi praises him in any way.

He's seen Kageyama give Hinata free drinks when he comes to the bar, seen Oikawa sneak kisses with Iwaizumi when they think no one is looking.

He imagines doing all these things with Kuroo: living in his apartment instead of the club, sharing those Looks, small kisses, holding hands…

He lifts one shoulder in a shrug for the third time, looking away to hide the way his neck is burning.

Kuroo laughs, less nervous and more amused, maybe even delighted as he reaches out to take his hand. “We’ll start small.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the [song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cE6wxDqdOV0) kenma dances to
> 
> kenma is drawing lilacs when he meets kuroo at the shop lilacs mean first love HOO HOO
> 
> uhh dango is a japanese pastry thing. three lil rice based ball things on a stick or smth. there's an emoji of it
> 
> here [ART](http://dysphania.tumblr.com/post/116790158983/tattoos) [THINGS](http://nairuru.tumblr.com/post/137380126596/kiss-me-i-cant-believe-this-is-my-first-time) of kuroo's tattoos
> 
> for kenma's nightmare this chapter, he remembers feeling as though he was running in place as a child with jack and micky, and even though he's the one who left them he feels as though they abandoned him


	8. With Love, Love

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hello children you've reached the end of my rope i mean story congratulations

**August 2016**

“Hey,” Kuroo starts seemingly out of nowhere one afternoon. Sprawled out partially on top of him, head on his chest, wings draped over the back of the couch and onto the floor, Kenma is half watching the movie, half dozing. He lifts his head to visually acknowledge Kuroo. “Do you… live in that club where you work?” he asks, voice quiet under the noisy air conditioner in the window behind them.

Kenma blinks at him sleepily, then nods once. He thought that had been pretty obvious.

“So is there – In the back there must be like, rooms or something, right?”

He nods again.

“Is it like… dorms?”

Kenma shrugs, lies back down on Kuroo’s chest to signify that he could hardly care less about this conversation.

“Right, okay, sorry,” Kuroo huffs, getting the hint. “I guess you probably don’t know what dorms are like.” He lifts one arm to lay it lazily across Kenma’s back and shoulders. “Do you like it? Living there?”

He shrugs again. It’s by far the best place he’s ever lived. All he has to compare it to is a lab where he was tortured and abused, and the streets where he starved and sold his body. So of course he likes it. But he’s not particularly attached to the place. Even when he gets to be alone in his room he can still hear everyone else in the club being loud, no matter what time of night or day it is.

“Would you… Maybe wanna…” Kuroo clears his throat. “You could live here. With me,”

He really doesn’t have to think about it too much before he’s nodding.

 

Sharing the apartment with Kuroo isn’t much different than his previous arrangement of jumping back and forth. If he’s being honest, it’s actually easier like this. He doesn’t have to worry about forgetting clothes, or leaving important things here or there. It feels steadying to only have one place to go after work, or after a day out with Kuroo, even if he has to stay awake on the train for an extra half hour.

Ukai helps him finish setting up his legal papers with his newfound given name, then helps him with all the change of address forms and how to write a check and help pay the bills. Formerly distant and even a bit cold to Kenma, he begins to see why Oikawa calls him dad.

Of course, Kuroo’s apartment only has one bedroom.

But considering they’ve been sharing it half the time anyway, neither of them particularly minds. There is also the matter of Kenma’s clothes, but this is resolved with one trip to Ikea followed by several hours of confused assembly. They manage to set up a chest of drawers in the living room, under the TV that previously sat on the floor.

After that, living together becomes as natural as breathing. Kuroo has classes most days, and even though he’s gone by the time Kenma wakes up around noon, he always leaves a plate of breakfast with a sticky note on it wishing him a good day.

Kenma eats while sketching whatever he sees out the window or around the apartment, or struggling to navigate Instagram or Snapchat, then wanders around exploring the apartment until it’s time for him to go to work.

On this particular Friday, Kuroo’s morning class is canceled, so he joins Kenma in his quiet daily routine. Kenma wakes up with his arm still draped over Kuroo’s waist, nose pressed to the bare muscles and ink crisscrossing his back. (A nearly ten-foot wingspan makes being the little spoon rather difficult.)

A glance at Kuroo’s Adventure Time clock on the wall tells him it’s a bit past ten; he’s woken up early for some reason. Kuroo, on the other hand, has vastly overslept, and he removes his arm to shake him by the shoulder.

“Mwo?” _What?_ Kuroo grumbles in Korean after a moment, shifting away so Kenma will stop shaking him. “What, what is it? Are you okay?” He sits up and rubs one eye, his hair even more of a wreck than usual.

Kenma quickly points to Kuroo, eyebrows furrowed, then positions his hands like he’s cupping a ball in front of his chest, palms facing Kuroo and thumbs slightly overlapping. He circles his hands around the imaginary ball until his palms are facing his own chest, pinkies touching.

_Don’t you have class?_

Kuroo relaxes at the question, shaking his head no. “The AC in the English building – Look at this email my professor sent.” He digs around in the sheets for his phone, unlocks it before shoving it in Kenma’s face. He takes the phone and moves it away so he can actually read the screen.

_Hello students,_

_As you all know, we are in the middle of a heat wave. It’s 32ºC today with nearly 80% humidity and I have just received an email saying the air conditioning in our building is not working._

_I don’t want to die in this heat and I don’t think you do either. Class is canceled please stay home and stay cool._

_Happy Melting,_

_Yamazaki-san_

Kenma grins as he hands the phone back. He’s never met any of Kuroo’s professors – a college campus probably wouldn’t be the best place for a boy with wings, and he has no reason to go anyway – but this particular one has sent entertaining emails before, and he’s always enjoyed them.

“Well, I guess we get to spend the morning together then, don’t we?” Kuroo smiles. He pushes himself out of bed and stretches, bare skin pulling taut over the faint lines of muscle, the tribal swirls and geometric triangles on his bicep shifting –

Kenma looks away, ruffling his wings to get all the feathers back in place.

“C’mon,” Kuroo yawns, “Do you know how to make rice pancakes?”

Kenma shakes his head, taking Kuroo’s outstretched hand to pull himself out of bed.

“I’ll teach you.”

 

**September 2016**

Spending all his free time in his and Kuroo’s apartment instead of the club, he starts to miss it a little. It’s not the same when he’s working, when everyone is running around each other half naked and covered in glitter, complaining about customers and trying not to bump into people doing makeup. So the easy solution is to go in during the day, _before_ work.

Kuroo walks him to the train station before he has to head back for his own job, kisses his head and tells him he’ll see him tomorrow. Kenma gets on the train with a smile.

He hadn’t wanted to spend all day in an empty club, so Shouyou is supposed to meet him an hour or so after he gets there. He’s content to entertain himself until then, he’s sure Noya or Yamaguchi will be there to talk to him about the new restaurant down the street or play video games.

He spends the train ride and short walk to the club listening to one of Kuroo’s favorite bands on his phone, flitting between the shadows of buildings and spreading his wings the tiniest bit to avoid the heat of the sun.

When he lets himself in through the back door of the club, he’s surprised at the music coming from the front. It’s not Tsukishima’s slow, heavy beat, or Oikawa’s punctuated European bands, or even Yamaguchi’s fast-paced Chinese pop. It’s light and quick for a moment, then deep and slower, then somewhere in the middle, jumping and rising and falling – it’s classical music.

More than a little confused, he heads through the tunnel and out onto the floor. He can’t see who’s in the DJ booth from this angle, so he heads toward the booths to the left of the tunnel door, hoping to enjoy the music for a while as he waits.

He settles in a random booth, dropping his bag and pulling out a pack of bear shaped cookies, his sketchpad, and a pencil. He’s been working on his shading lately, can’t quite get the hang of it unless he’s only using the most basic lighting source.

He’s been working from a picture he took of Shouyou a while back, standing out in the street after work, lit from the right by the bus stop they’d been standing near, and from below by his phone screen. It’s a nice picture, and he likes the challenge of Shouyou’s insane hair.

Scotland. He wonders where the hell _that_ is.

He must lose track of time, because the next thing he knows the front door of the club is slamming open and there's someone screaming, “BROOOOO!”

It's definitely not Shouyou.

Kenma peeks his head above the top of the booth to see Tanaka, standing with his feet apart, arms flung out to the side, still screaming. Kenma blinks over wide eyes, then immediately turns around when he hears another door slam open.

It's the door to the DJ booth, and Noya stands there matching Tanaka’s pose (down to the yelling) for a moment. He must be the one playing classical music, which is very at odds with the scene going on in front of him.

Still shouting, Noya jumps onto the banister and slides down the stairs to the first level, hitting the dance floor at a run. Tanaka starts charging toward him as well, and they meet in the middle after Noya has leaped out of the sunken dance floor and Tanaka has weaved his way through all the tables. They do a ridiculous spin, and Noya ends up on Tanaka’s back, one hand around his neck, one hand punching the air.

When they finally run out of breath, Tanaka lets his friend slide to the floor.

“Haha, que pasa, hermano?” _What’s up, bro?_ Noya asks, punching Ryuu in the arm.

He grins back, ruffles the hair hanging over Noya’s face. “Nothin’ much, Daichi-san just asked me to come in so I could replace the cameras. We got new ones! No more static.”

“Neat.”

“Whatcha listening to? This Vivaldi?”

“Yeah man! Four Seasons! This dancer girl I know, she models for me sometimes…”

Kenma sits back down, tuning out their conversation so he can go back to his drawing. Noya continues to surprise him time and time again. He’s a shameless, loudmouthed, pierced stripper, but he’s also a focused, talented art student who listens to classical music. Definitely not what Kenma would have predicted.

He startles to attention again when he hears his name.

“ – Kenma?”

He jerks his head up to peek over the top of the booth again, seeing the older two boys peering at him.

“It is Kenma!” Noya exclaims, throwing his hands up and running over. He throws himself into the other side of the booth, Tanaka joining him calmly a second later. “Que pasa, Pudín, how long you even been here? I didn’t notice you!” Kenma is about to worry about how he’s going to answer that when Noya keeps talking. “Hasn’t been too long, has it?”

He shakes his head no, relieved that he won’t have to attempt to sign something or go through the trouble of writing. Noya has always been good about phrasing things in yes or no questions. He nudges the half eaten bag of cookies toward the two in offering.

“The music bothering you?” Noya asks as he pops a few bears in his mouth, “I can turn it down, didn’t realize I wasn’t alone.”

_No._

“All right, sweet! This is my favorite Vivaldi piece, I like blasting it. Anyway, what are you working on?” He places his hands on the table to push himself up so he can peer over the edge and into the sketchbook in Kenma’s lap. “Oh hey, you draw too?? Lemme see!” He starts bouncing in place, and Kenma is reminded of the first night he met Kuroo, when Yamamoto jumped on the table to get out of the booth instead of making them get up.

Luckily, Noya stays in place. Kenma quickly slides his sketchbook across the table to keep him there. He slides his phone across next to show him the picture he’s working from, and Noya and Tanaka cram their faces together to observe the photo and drawing.

“Hey, this is pretty good!” Noya says.

“Yeah, he’s almost better than you, Yuu!” Tanaka jabs with a smile.

Noya doesn’t take offense. “Now now, talent isn’t a competition! Skills are always growing! I’m sure there’s plenty we could both teach each other.” He wags a finger in Tanaka’s face like a teacher lecturing a small child, and to his credit the taller boy nods along seriously, despite Noya being a year and a half younger than him. “For instance –” he leans over the drawing again, studying both it and the picture for a moment. “– So the light is definitely coming from the left here, right? That’s – What is that? Sekimukae Station?”

Kenma nods.

“Right, so it’s coming from the station, but the light isn’t just radiating outward from the entire place is it? I mean, it kind of is, that’s the point of the lights, but that’s not how illustration works.”

He tugs on the swinging ends of his hair as he speaks, eyebrows drawing together as he gets more involved in the art. He starts to mumble something unintelligible, it could be in Spanish or Japanese or a mix of both, it’s too quiet for anyone to understand.

“So for all intents and purposes,” he continues, back to his accented but clear Japanese, “Where is the light mainly coming from?”

Kenma points upward. The lights are on the ceiling.

“Right. So when you think about that light, think of it coming, at least in some places, from more of a ‘this’ direction –” He moves his fingers over the paper diagonally, from the top left to the bottom right, “– than from just a flat ‘this’ direction.” His fingers move straight, from left to right. “Got it?”

Kenma nods, grateful for the tip.

“Great!”

“You’re so smart, Yuu,” Tanaka sighs dramatically.

Noya smiles at him. “You’re not so bad yourself, Ryuu.”

“You make my heart melt, bro.”

“Eres mi mundo entero, hermano.” _You’re my whole world, bro._

They continue like this, laughing and exchanging cheesy lines as they slide out of the booth, returning to what they’re supposed to be doing.

 

_He sits in front of a vanity mirror in the pit._

_His reflection is weird and distorted, it keeps jumping and shifting. It’s frustrating, but he ignores it. That’s just the way reflections are, he thinks. Hazy and imperfect._

_There’s a tube of vermillion lipstick in his hand – odd, he doesn’t usually wear lipstick – but he lifts it to his face anyway, leaning toward the mirror and squinting in an effort to keep his reflection still._

_He blinks. When he opens his eyes, they’re gone from the surface of the mirror. But clearly he can still see, so he thinks nothing of it. He lifts the lipstick to his forehead, carefully begins to draw a flower. The stem is long, the leaves curled into themselves, the flower itself only one large petal. Bell shaped. He draws right over where his eye should be, feeling nothing._

_When he blinks again, his nose is gone._

_Then his mouth._

_Then his ears._

_Then his hair._

_He’s not wearing a shirt, isn’t sure that he ever was in the first place. His wings still rest behind and above his shoulders, glittering and soft. His skin is practically white, featureless and flawless, shiny like the plastic of a mannequin. He’s breathing slow and even, hand steady._

_He keeps drawing orchids._

Kenma is still as he wakes, simply opens his eyes.

He’s lying in Kuroo’s bed – their bed? – as pale sunlight streams through the small cracks in the blinds. They fall in waves across the rumpled bedspread near his feet, as they do in the early morning. He shouldn’t be awake yet.

The sound of running water reaches him from the bathroom: Kuroo leaving the water running as he brushes his teeth. Kenma can’t find it in him to be annoyed by the waste. He curls his legs up to his chest and draws the blanket to his chin, an attempt to fend off the early morning chill that has started to creep in with the changing seasons, curling his wings around his arms.

As he tries to push the dream from his mind, the water shuts off, changes to socked feet padding over the carpet down the hall and toward the bedroom.

“Annyeong,” Kuroo smiles when he sees that Kenma is awake. “Early riser today?”

Kenma shakes his head, pulls the blankets tighter.

“Ahh, not ready to face the world yet, little bird?” Kuroo asks, a teasing lilt in his voice.

His voice banishes the lingering uneasiness from the dream, and Kenma lifts his head to poke his tongue out in response.

“I see. Well don’t stay in bed until work, okay? Eat something. There’s leftover chicken in the fridge. I’ll see you tonight, before you leave.” Kuroo bends over the bed, hesitating for just a moment before pressing a kiss to Kenma’s cheek.

Kenma pretends to be annoyed, swatting at Kuroo’s face. He retaliates by ducking around his hands, laughing a little as he presses another dozen kisses to the side of Kenma’s head until he draws an airy laugh out of the younger boy.

“That’s more like it,” Kuroo laughs as he stands up. “I’ll see you tonight, Kenma,” he repeats, and Kenma nods.

 

“You should go to art school,” Kuroo says one day, as he watches Kenma recreate the street at a fraction of the size with nothing but a pencil.

Kenma’s hand halts for a moment, but he doesn’t look up from the drawing. He seems to contemplate the idea for a moment before simply lifting his left hand, pinching his fingertips together. _No._ He keeps drawing.

“What?! Why not?” Kuroo cries, leaning closer to inspect the paper. It’s essentially perfect, every detail accurate and proportional. “Kenma this is _amazing,_ and you’ve never even had formal instruction! Imagine what you could do with a little bit of structure!”

Kenma leans away slightly, just enough to give himself some breathing room. For once he’s thankful that he doesn’t have to speak, because he doesn’t have to move the scarf away from the face in order to be understood.

He points out with both index fingers, quickly pointing out and then down, then extends the fingers of both hands like he’s going to clap, fingers pointing perpendicular to each other. His left hand hovers above his right. His right hand stays still, as he lowers his left to tap his palms together before moving it back up, moving it a small circle. He points to himself, then rotates his wrist out so his finger is pointing kind of diagonally in front of him. His other index finger comes down to swipe over it perpendicularly. He shakes his head the whole time.

_I can’t go to college._

Kuroo pouts as he reads his hands. “Why not?” he asks again.

Again Kenma flattens both hands, claps them together twice. He points to himself, then makes a thumbs up with one hand, drags his thumb along the underside of his chin until it points up out in front of him. Again he points out with both index fingers, then quickly curves them forward to point down.

_I didn’t go to school._

“I guess you’re right…” Kuroo hums, “I can’t think of a college that’s gonna accept a kid with no prior education. Maybe we could get you a tutor or something.”

_No._

“Don’t be like that,” Kuroo chides. “You’re incredibly talented. You could sell your stuff, or get commissions or something.”

Kenma points to himself, then pinches his thumb and index finger together twice, fingertips toward the sky, then points down to the ground. He holds both hands in fists, like he’s going to play rocks-paper-scissors, thumbs on top, then touches the heels of his hands and his knuckles together. He pinches the fingertips of his thumb, index, and middle fingers together, then flattens his palms horizontally once more, clapping them together twice.

_I can do that without going to school._

Kuroo tilts his head in consideration. “I suppose you can. It’ll be hard to get started though.”

Kenma bends his fingers forward, touching the tips to his forehead before drawing them back out, thumb and pinkie extended as he furrows his eyebrows.

_Why?_

“Well, same reason it would be hard for you to college, I guess,” Kuroo shrugs. “You don’t have any… credibility I guess. There’s no record of what you can do, aside from like, whatever portfolio you can put together. It would be easy for people to hire you once you’ve been hired before, but for that to happen you have to actually, y’know, get hired for the first time.”

The younger boy considers this as he idly sketches the fish illustration on a nearby sign.

Kuroo shrugs again. “I guess… You could start putting your work out there.”

 

**October 2016**

Kenma waits for Kuroo to look up at him. When he does, he points to himself, then spreads his fingers, touching the middle one to his chin before moving it down to touch the side of his chest. Then he points his first two fingers on each out, crossed in an x over each other with his right hand on top. He rubs his top fingers back and forth a few times.

_My birthday is coming up._

Kuroo raises his eyebrows with a smile. “Oh is it? When?”

Holding his pinkie down with his thumb, Kenma twists his hand by the wrist twice, so his palm alternates facing him and facing outward.

_The sixteenth._

“And you’ll be eighteen, won’t you?”

He nods.

“You know, that would make you an adult, out west. America, Canada. Most of Europe.” Kuroo boops his nose. “Not here. I’m the only adult here, kiddo.”

Kenma sticks his tongue out.

“Do you wanna do anything special? I’ll buy you apple pie, I know you like it.”

He tries not to look too enthusiastic when he nods.

 

The morning of Kenma’s birthday is a nice one. The apartment is warm when he wakes – late, because Saturday nights are busy – and Kuroo’s face is the first thing he sees.

They’re lying on their sides facing each other, Kuroo’s arm draped over his waist, one of Kenma’s wings spread across the rest of the bed behind him as the other slowly slides off his body. Despite his eyes being closed, Kenma can tell Kuroo is awake. He’s smiling too much, and it’s nearly one thirty in the afternoon.

He reaches up to softly touch the corner of Kuroo’s lips. His smile twitches under Kenma’s fingertips, then widens as he opens his eyes.

“Happy birthday, Angel,” he whispers, and manages to twist his head quick enough to get a kiss on the tip of Kenma’s finger.

Kenma smiles back, manages to say, _Thank you,_ in the small space between their faces.

“You took off work tonight, right?”

He nods. Shouyou had made a big stink about not getting to see him on his birthday until Kenma promised he would call at some point during the day. Kuroo would be there to interpret his signs and respond through the speaker accordingly.

“Good,” Kuroo smirks, “I don’t have to worry about wearing you out.”

Kenma squints suspiciously at the look on his face, but Kuroo just laughs, kissing Kenma’s forehead and pushing himself backward so he can get out of bed. Kenma follows reluctantly, stretching as he enters the kitchen.

Kuroo is already hard at work, dashing around frying beef and chopping vegetables and measuring spices. Kenma isn’t sure _what_ dish is put in front of him, but Kuroo tells him it’s Korean and he eats every bite. There’s only room for one at the tiny table in the cramped kitchen, but Kuroo insists he doesn’t mind eating at the counter, standing. He laughs at how quickly Kenma eats, shifting restlessly from leg to leg as he watches.

“Go shower and get dressed,” Kuroo tells him as Kenma puts his dish in the sink. “Dress warm, we’re going out.” He ruffles Kenma’s hair as he passes and laughs again as Kenma swipes at him like a cat.

They take the train into the nice part of the city. Kenma wears one of Kuroo’s jackets draped over his wings and his own crew neck sweater, jeans and well-worn sneakers, and eventually manages to nab Kuroo’s beanie. He has a hood to cover his horrible hat hair anyway. They both carry bags, containing water bottles, wallets, sunglasses and keys, spare socks… Kenma _might_ have overpacked.

“We’re going anywhere you want,” Kuroo declares when they get off the train.

Kenma has only been to this part of the city once, a few weeks prior. He was with Akaashi, who grew up here, and Shouyou, who wanted to take Kenma to a nice restaurant but didn’t want to get lost. Kenma had paid more attention to Shouyou’s babbling than to where they were going, so he doesn’t know where anything is. He looks up at Kuroo and shrugs.

“Wanna check out any art stores? Clothing stores? We can buy you your own hat.” He bops the beanie that sits atop Kenma’s hair.

Though he tries to hide it, Kenma smiles as he rolls his eyes. But he touches in fingers to the hat and nods anyway, because he likes the way Kuroo looks with a beanie and wants to give it back as soon as possible.

“There’s a VANS store near here, I think,” Kuroo hums. “We can buy you a beanie.” Kenma smiles and nods, smiles even wider when Kuroo takes his hand, placing it in his own pocket to keep warm.

This part of the city is so different from what he’s used to. It seems brighter, more open, with even sidewalks and nice cars littered among the taxis in the street. Stray cats aren’t darting between buildings or prowling dumpsters, the air doesn’t smell like food or garbage, other pedestrians aren’t hiding weapons beneath the folds of their clothes. They just bustle up and down the sidewalk, all sharp suits and manicured nails, and Kenma feels more out of place than normal.

He steps closer to Kuroo, shifting his hand in Kuroo’s pocket from holding Kuroo’s palm to lacing their fingers together.

“Pretty fancy, huh?” Kuroo grins at him, his lips lopsided and imperfect, teeth not entirely straight, and it makes Kenma feel better.

He nods.

“Not quite what you’re used to.”

Another nod.

Kuroo looks back out at the street ahead of them, smile shrinking but not disappearing. “Bokuto and I were captains of our volleyball teams. We used to do training weeks together, and we’d take everyone here to go shopping for a day, or whatever. It was a good time.”

Kenma points to his chest, then pinches his fingertips together and places them against his forehead. He pulls his hand away, opening his fingers and rotating his wrist out so his palm is facing away. He points to Kuroo before making a B with his right hand – four fingers straight up and together with his thumb in front of his palm. He places the heel of his hand against the top of his head and moves it out twice, in the direction Bokuto’s hair goes.

_I didn’t know you knew Bokuto._

Kuroo laughs shortly. “Oh, did I never mention it to you?”

_No._

“Ah, we went to high school at the same time. We were just on opposing teams for the first two years, but we became a little closer third year when we were both captains. I actually hadn’t seen him since high school when we met again at the club.” Kuroo rubs the back of his neck. “He actually… he’s kind of the reason we noticed each other.”

Kenma smiles. He’ll definitely have to thank Bokuto if he ever gets the chance.

After another minute of walking, surrounded by the polite city chatter and car engines, Kuroo points a sign above their heads. “VANS store,” he announces, and pulls Kenma forward.

The inside is large, but the design makes it feel smaller. It’s all dark wood and black matte floors that absorb the excess noise. The racks of thick, soft sweatshirts and t-shirts serve as further mufflers. Shoes line the walls to the left and right, backpacks hanging behind the desk at the end of the long room.

Kenma gestures vaguely around the room before placing his thumb against his chest, pinkie pointing directly in front of him. He wiggles his fingers.

_This place is cool._

“You think so?” Kuroo grins. “Pick out anything you want, I’ll pay. Birthday treat.”

Kenma squints at him, bends his fingers so they’re at a ninety-degree angle with his palm before touching his fingertips to his chest. Then he makes a fist with his right hand, leaving only his pinkie standing straight up. He quickly flips his hand around and opens his fingers, stopping when his hand is facing palm up. Then he points at Kuroo.

_Do you have a job?_

“Do I – _Yes,_ I have a job, Kenma,” Kuroo laughs. “Don’t play smart with me.” He pushes gently on his shoulder. “Go shop.”

Kenma smiles back, wandering over toward the nearest rack of sweatshirts. He rubs the fabric of the sweatshirt in front of him between his fingers – it’s thick, soft, a dusty ultramarine. With a blink it’s November 2011 and he’s thirteen years old, painfully skinny, taller than he knows how to handle, freezing and starving and desperate.

Kenma closes his eyes, pushes the memory from his mind. It’s October 2016, he’s eighteen today, with meat on his bones and food in his stomach and his boyfriend behind him. He’s warm, safe, happy.

The blue sleeve falls from between his fingers, and he pulls a red one off the rack instead.

Kuroo hums in approval, says casually, “I think you look better in red.”

Kenma blushes. Despite being used to people paying attention to what he looks like, it’s strange to hear it phrased so innocently. He’s grown accustomed to, ‘You’d look better under me,’ or ‘Your pretty lips would look good wrapped around my –’

“Hey, feel how soft these hats are,” Kuroo calls, beckoning him over from another rack.

Kenma snaps back to the store, mechanically moving his feet forward to stand beside Kuroo. Obediently, he reaches out to pinch one of the hats between his fingers, comforted by the way they sink into the plushness of it. His eyes skim over the colors before he picks out a simple gray one.

“A good choice,” Kuroo says with faux seriousness. His eyes drift down to Kenma’s shoes, the nicer of the two pairs he owns, black Nikes with a fuschia swoosh. Oikawa bought them when he first took him out shopping, close to a year ago now. He wears them to and from work, so by now they’re spotted with paint and foundation, the white tread gray with age. His other pair is the white heels he wears to dance in.

“You wanna pick out some shoes while we’re here?” Kuroo suggests.

He nods.

 

Kenma spends over 14,000 yen on a hoodie, some shoes, and two beanies, but Kuroo hardly flinches. Kenma half hides behind him at the checkout, but his wings are safely hidden beneath Kuroo’s coat, pressed so tightly to his back that his shoulders ache.

When they’re standing back on the sidewalk, October wind unable to slice through Kenma’s multiple coats, he hands Kuroo his beanie back. Digging his own out of his bag, he slides it over his hair to cover the undyed roots.

Kuroo winks at him once before shoving his own hat back on his head. “Dinner?” he asks. “I know it’s early, but by the time we find a place it should be about… four thirty or so?”

Kenma nods.

They get lost twice before Kuroo gives up and opens Maps on his phone, searching up the nearest restaurant. Kenma teases him by giving him an exaggerated look of confusion and pointing the opposite way the directions say every few minutes. Kuroo rolls his eyes, but it’s obvious he doesn’t truly mind. It’s five o’clock when they get to a restaurant.

Dinner is good, the place is affordable but a little too fancy for their beanies and layered hoodies and Adidas bags. They giggle at the serious businessmen at the next table, try to guess why there are multiple, different sized forks beside their chopsticks (Kuroo says it’s a western thing, Kenma only half believes him.)

As they step out of the restaurant, Kuroo pulls a scarf out of his bag and asks, “Want to do anything else?”

Kenma steps closer to him as the wind blows, hides behind his tall frame as he thinks. It’s around six, the sun starting to go down, but Kenma is used to living at night time. And despite feeling a bit out of place in this part of the city, he feels marginally safer than he does back home. The nightlife is nothing to fear here.

He holds up his left hand so his palm is facing his right hand, curled into a fist, pinkie extended. He drags his pinkie along the plane of his left hand as if drawing, then bends his fingers forward and makes a double shooing motion in front of him, like warding off a pesky child.

_Art store._

“Of course, birthday boy,” Kuroo says, reaching for Kenma’s hand. He laces their fingers together as he pulls up Maps with his other hand again. “I’m not tryna be out here until one in the morning, you feel me?” he mumbles through his scarf as he types BLICK into the search bar and selects the nearest one.

 _I feel_ , Kenma mouths, despite knowing Kuroo isn’t watching.

“This way~” Kuroo sings when the directions have loaded. He tugs Kenma by the hand down the street, and they admire the city sunset as they walk, watching it light the buildings mango and cream, listening to Siri tell them where to go.

“Have at it,” Kuroo says when they step inside the art supply store, and Kenma’s mouth almost drops open.

He spends an hour in the store, excitedly pointing to nearly everything and clinging to Kuroo’s arm like a little kid. Kuroo suggests he get some of the stuff he points at so enthusiastically, but Kenma shakes his head every time, insisting it’s not what he wants. Kuroo just shrugs, allows himself to be pulled along.

Halfway through an aisle, Kenma stops dead in his tracks, eyes like stars as he gazes at what’s in front of him.

“What?” Kuroo asks, confused as to why they’re stopped. Kenma has glided right past fountain pens, charcoal, and though he was delighted by the tower of Copic markers, they didn’t seize his attention like this.

Kenma points to what has caught his eye.

“Oh, watercolors?”

He mouths the word, still staring ahead. Slowly, he lifts a pallet off the shelf, carefully inspecting the colors.

“Is that what you want?” Kuroo asks. Kenma nods. “All right, grab one. You’re gonna need a brush, too.” While Kenma is still fawning over his new paints, Kuroo steers him back toward the brush section. “Here.” He points to the watercolor brushes, the kind that holds water in them. Kenma picks one up, holding it reverently. “And watercolor paper.”

Kenma looks up at him finally, furrowing his eyebrows and tilting his head. His hands are too full to sign.

“There’s special paper you use for watercolors,” Kuroo explains. “Or, so I’m told. It’s like…” He waves his hands, at a loss. “It’s rougher than normal paper, I guess. Watercolors look better on their own paper, I don't know what it is.” He nudges Kenma over to the paper section as he explains, begins hunting through the different labels.

“Here we go!” he announces after a moment of searching, picking up a pad roughly the same size as Kenma’s current sketchpad. He hands both to Kenma, who beams. “Now let’s get out of here before you empty my bank account.”

 

By the time they get back to the apartment, it’s nearly eight o’clock. Despite this normally being when his days really get started, Kenma is tired as hell, and more than a little relieved to finally be home after spending so long in the city. Shouyou had called on the walk from the train station to the apartment, and Kuroo had parked them at a bakery to talk and enjoy his promised apple pie.

“Do you want to watch a movie?” Kuroo asks as he sets their bags on the tiny kitchen table. “You still haven’t seen Spirited Away, that’s a classic.”

Kenma nods. A movie sounds nice. Cuddling with Kuroo sounds nice. He holds up one finger, signaling one moment, and retreats to the bedroom.

It feels good to finally shed his layers, to shrug Kuroo’s jacket off his shoulders and stretch his wings out, letting the tips extend several feet past his arms. He peels his sweatshirt and t-shirt off next, slipping on a soft, overlarge one that he pushes his wings through slowly, relishing in the feel of the loose fabric over his skin.

After shimmying out of his jeans and sneakers, he rejoins Kuroo in the living room in his shirt, boxers, and a new pair of fluffy socks. It would normally be too cold, but the apartment is warm.

Kuroo smiles when he sees him, waves from where he’s completely sprawled across the entire couch. Kenma wrinkles his nose at him.

Undeterred, Kuroo opens his arms wide, gesturing for Kenma to come lie on top of him. It’s a little awkward for a moment, takes a handful of seconds maneuvering and one knee coming dangerously close to slamming into Kuroo’s crotch, but eventually they get comfortable. Kuroo tugs the blanket off the back of the couch and drapes it over them.

“So,” he starts, picking up the Wii remote, “Spirited Away?” Kenma nods as he settles his head on Kuroo’s shoulder.

He’ll admit, he dozes for a large part of the movie. It’s easy, when the music is gentle and the colors are delicate and unimposing, and the words are lilted and easy, and Kuroo is warm beneath him. Feeling safe is not something he’s really accustomed to, though it’s becoming more familiar the longer he lives with Kuroo.

“Hey,” Kuroo says softly at one point, and Kenma surfaces from his haze with a small intake of breath and fluttering eyelashes. “Do you wanna go to bed?” One of Kuroo’s hands is on his lower back above his shirt, slowly rubbing circles. The other is propped beneath his head, elbow in the air.

Kenma shakes his head.

“You sure? You were falling asleep.”

He shakes his head again, this time a denial.

“Yes, you were,” Kuroo smiles. “Your body jerks as it falls asleep, cuz it’s trying to test if you’re still awake or not. You were doing that.”

Kenma buries his head in Kuroo’s neck, shakes his head for the third time, this time just petulant and stubborn.

Kuroo laughs. “Whatever you say, Angel.”

He’s thankful his face is hidden, because he’s blushing.

After it subsides, he turns his face so he can see the TV again, watching as the boiler man gives the little girl train tickets. He follows along for a while before he starts to drift again.

When he actually feels his body do the jerking thing, Kuroo pats his back and starts trying to sit up. “Come on,” he says, “You’re going to bed.”

Kenma whines (would be whining) and buries his face in Kuroo’s shirt again, trying to push him back down on the couch.

“Come on, Kenma, time for a good night’s rest.” Kuroo wraps his arms around Kenma’s waist and manages to force them both into a sitting position. Kenma hurries to shift his legs to the side so he doesn’t end up with his back snapped in half. When Kuroo is finished making stupid He-Man noises and sitting up, Kenma is nestled comfortably in his lap, laughing silently at Kuroo’s theatrics.

“Enjoy the gun show, Kitten?” Kuroo asks, briefly letting go of Kenma to strike several different flexing poses.

Kenma giggles a little more at his ridiculousness, but nods.

“Good.” Kuroo wraps his arms back around Kenma’s waist, leans down to hug him.

It’s a little shocking, as Kenma is not accustomed to being hugged. But it’s unbelievably nice, being surrounded by Kuroo’s warmth and smell, so he leans into him, resting his head in the juncture between Kuroo’s neck and shoulder.

It’s quiet.

When Kuroo starts to pull back, Kenma refuses to let him go at first, unwilling to relinquish the warmth and comfort, but Kuroo keeps tugging backward. Reluctantly, Kenma sits up straight. Instead of nudging him off and telling him to go to bed again, Kuroo just stares down at him. Kenma stares back, and they breathe together.

Slowly, one of Kuroo’s hands rises between them, cupping Kenma’s jaw with a tenderness he’s almost never felt in all his eighteen years. Kuroo angles his head up, staring at him with complete clarity. “Kenma,” he murmurs, then chuckles. “Ha. Kenma. Y’know, that means ‘doom’ in Korean.”

Kenma stares. _Of course._ He frowns, opens his mouth on instinct even though he can’t protest, but then Kuroo’s lips are on his, slow and feather soft as they close around his top one, hold for a moment, and release on the exhale.

It’s Kenma’s first kiss.

 

(Just before he goes to bed, Kenma posts his first Instagram picture. It’s a photo of the skyscrapers, dull brown with the sky fading from brilliant plum to peach to salmon. He captions it only with the sun emoji, and everyone who follows him likes it.)

 

**November 2016**

“Hey, guys…?” Hinata starts from a bench in the pit, phone in his hands and eyebrows furrowed. Kenma is busy putting on makeup, so he can’t go over, but he listens in.

“What’s up?” Noya asks, looking over from where he’s practicing swirling glow-in-the-dark body paint over Yamaguchi’s thigh and side. Yamaguchi himself will never wear it, but all the dancers are too busy to be practiced on, and the break a few of them are on isn’t long enough to undergo a full body painting and then wash it off again.

“I just got an email,” Hinata continues warily.

Kenma blinks.

Noya and Yamaguchi share _What?_ looks before getting up and moving to stand behind Hinata. “Que dice?” Noya asks, peering over his shoulder.

“Heh?”

“What does it say?” he clarifies.

Hinata slumps backwards, wails, “I don’t know! I can’t read it!”

Tsukishima sneers from the other bench, doesn’t look up from his phone. “You can’t read it? What are you, illiterate? I know you dropped out of school, but really.”

“No! It’s not in Japanese!” Hinata snaps defensively.

Noya leans in closer, squinting at the screen. “Well, what is it?”

“It’s ah, western?”

Tsukishima rubs his eyes under his glasses. “Useless.”

Suga comes over at all the commotion, leans over Hinata’s other shoulder behind Yamaguchi, prompting the younger boy to shift out of the way. “That’s English,” he tells them. “I’m pretty sure. English doesn’t have any funny accents like French or Spanish.”

“Are you calling my accent funny?” Noya challenges.

“Of course not,” Suga says placatingly, though his attention is still on Hinata’s phone.

“Just get Tanaka in here,” Tsukishima says. “He’s American, isn’t he?”

“Tanaka can’t read English!” Noya says. “Just cuz his _mom_ and Ukai are half American –”

“Well, what about Daichi?” the blond boy cuts him off smoothly.

Suga shakes his head. “Daichi can’t read English either.”

Hinata bends to the side, craning his neck up so he can look at Suga. “Isn’t he like, half American though?”

“His mother was half American, as Tanaka’s is,” Suga corrects, “But I don’t think he can read it. And besides, we shouldn’t be distracting him from work.”

“He’s been all grumpy lately,” Noya pouts, “What’s with that?”

Suga waves his hand dismissively. “Unrest in American politics. Their presidential election is coming up, and one of the candidates is, well, as they’d say, ‘a shit show.’” He says the three words in English, then repeats them in Japanese.

“What use are all these biracial people if no one is bilingual,” Tsukishima mumbles.

“Ay, lo siento, ¿hablas Alemán?” _Oh, I’m sorry, do you speak German?_ Noya snaps, whirling on the blond boy.

Tsukishima squints at him. _“What?”_

Yamaguchi side eyes Tsukishima. “You need read Chinese, you call me.”

Suga gives him the same look. “I speak a good deal of Chinese as well.”

“Oikawa-san still speaks fluent Korean,” Hinata reminds them. “I think he was getting rusty for a while, but now he has Kuroo-san to practice on.” He glances over at Kenma and smiles when he says this. “And Kenma speaks sign language!”

“Technically no speak,” Yamaguchi smiles, quirking an eyebrow at him playfully from across the room. Kenma smiles back.

“Whatever,” Tsukishima grumbles.

“And you don’t even speak German,” Noya accuses, this time in Japanese.

“I speak a little bit!” Tsukishima snaps back, glaring up from his phone. Then he goes back to grumbling. “I understand it, mostly, but I speak a little.”

“Prove it!”

“Children, children,” Suga chides, waving his hands at them to calm down. “No one is bullying anyone about their heritage. Back to work, all of you.”

“Wait, but I wanna know what this email says!”

 

**December 2016**

Kuroo’s fingers ghost over the thick skin of his shoulders. Kenma can hardly feel them, is never quite sure when Kuroo’s fingers hover above the skin or actually touch it. But he knows the older man’s focus is riveted there.

Kenma’s own focus is on his fingers, curled in his lap in front of him. He picks nervously at his nails and at the bedsheets between his crossed legs, spreads his wings a little wider as he allows, for the first time, Kuroo to see his back, exposed clearly without the covering of makeup or lights or his wings.

“You said… you _grew_ these?” Kuroo asks softly. He breathes a soft exclamation in Korean.

Kenma lowers his head a small amount as he remembers the unbelievable pain that permeates his earliest memories. Nods. Shivers in the December draft coming from the poorly insulated window.

“I mean… _How?”_

Kenma is turning a pen around in his fingers, a notebook in front of him. He’d assumed Kuroo would have questions, many of them having answers too long and complicated to sign. He clicks the pen open, writes, _Sendai Genetics Lab. Subject 75._

“The lab…” Kuroo murmurs. “I thought they got shut down. Back in two thousand eight.”

 _I was 9 years old,_ Kenma writes, _I escaped._

“At nine years old? There was footage on the news of the army storming that place.”

Kenma readjusts the pen in his hand. _2 older kids helped me escape. They’re names were Micky and Jack they spoke english and took me with them they ran away. I stayed with them for a few months but I left they didn’t like me or eech other. I got…_

He pauses, trying to remember exactly what happened. His memories of his time alone are vague, filled with phantom aches and hunger. He continues.

_I got arested or sumething when I was maybe 15. I don’t remember. I was steeling food I was starving. I ended up in a police station looking at a wanted board it had Micky’s picture and information on it. But I haven’t seen her. Jack is gone._

Kuroo reads silently over his shoulder, not commenting on any misspellings or grammar.

“That’s amazing,” Kuroo murmurs. “I can’t imagine…” He runs his fingers over one of the long vertical scars beneath a wing. Hastily cut to allow a growing wing through the skin, hastily stitched to stop the bleeding and close the wound, it healed a mess.

The red has faded, but Shouyou usually covers it with a bit of concealer before he goes out to work, and with the distance between the stage and the audience, the lights, and never spreading his wings too far from his back, the scars go mostly unnoticed.

“So many scars,” Kuroo murmurs.

Kenma flinches. Clicking the pen open again, he idly scrawls, _Ugly,_ down in the corner of the page.

Kuroo apparently notices. He leans forward, placing his lips over the top of Kenma’s spine. “No,” he murmurs, his lips brushing over the skin. “Scars are not ugly.” He wraps his arms around Kenma’s waist, one encircling him as the other finds a hand to hold. Kenma does his best to shift his wings out of the way.

“I once read a book,” Kuroo begins, “By a British author. His name was Chris Cleave. The book was _The Other Hand._ It’s a complicated book, and I read it in English, so a lot of parts were lost on me. But I remember a line one of the characters said.” He tightens his arm around Kenma, lifts his head to rest on his shoulder so he can speak in his ear. “The first part doesn’t translate that well, but they basically said, ‘Scars are not formed in death. Scars mean that I survived.’” Kuroo pauses, leaning his head against Kenma’s. “You survived.”

Somewhat reluctantly, Kenma nods. _He survived._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> about the dream – orchids represent exotic beauty. feels like a pretty thing to be dressed up and admired
> 
> now that kenma is learning more sign language and beginning to sign full sentences instead of just single words, i'd like to give yall a v short lesson, if you're interested.  
> grammar in asl is a bit different than grammar in english. a lot of filler words are lost, and the order switches. directly translated, he says 'go to college i can't.' 'school i not go.' 'i do this with no school.' it's up to the people in the conversation to read the signs for what they are, then glean the meaning.
> 
> you are legally an adult at twenty in japan. but uhh you can get your license at eighteen
> 
> that second to last section was just like. how many nationalities/languages can i CRAM into one lil vignette. (and it was junk mail)
> 
> the quote thing kuroo says is 'a scar does not form on the dying. a scar means, 'i survived.'' i dropped it in google translate, switched to japanese, then switched it back for that rough translation. fun stuff.
> 
> SO AS YOU HAVE BY NOW NO DOUBT NOTICED, assuming you're someone who's been reading as i update and not just now that it's finished, this has always said 'part one of the city of angels series.' that's cuz it is. the following stories, in order, will be origin stories/insights into the lives of suga, hinata, oikawa, noya, and yamaguchi. and at the end there's a lil story that picks up where this one leaves off kind of just to address some more stuff about kenma and his furthering relationship that i couldn't cram in here.
> 
> uh THAT'S ENOUGH WORDS!!!!! thank you SO MUCH for reading my monstrous hulking atmospheric thing!!!!! i don't really know what i was trying to achieve by writing this but i think i did it anyway. so that's, dope. yeah anyway i gotta go it's finals i got shit to do


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